


Separation

by goingbadly



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Kidnapping, M/M, Partner Swapping, Stockholm Syndrome, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-08 17:29:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 15
Words: 48,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingbadly/pseuds/goingbadly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two inches of steel times sixteen corridor walls. Four feet of air in each hallway. Three hall doors at two inches a piece, five locks (which don't factor in to distance), two windows (which might actually make things easier), and an unknown number of men with guns. Sebastian Moran is sixty-nine feet, ten inches from James Moriarty - give or take, and it might as well be a million miles. It's not all bad, though. They've jailed him in the same cell as the do-gooder from 221B, and if Sebastian doesn't have his own genius, he'll just have to make do with Sherlock...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Getting Along

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to NailBunny for the prompt! Ish. Thing.
> 
> /This is probably not what you were expecting./

A bead of sweat runs through Sebastian’s hair to the hands he’s got clasped behind his head. The man in front of him holding the Heckler and Koch UMP uses it to motion Sebastian to the left.

“No,” Sebastian snarls.

“Do it, Tiger.” Jim’s voice is easy, unhurried. “The nice man looks a little nervous. Wouldn’t want his finger to slip.”

“You could always stay where you are. _Love_ to see you get shot.”

“Not sure I _like_ this new sarcastic side of you, sexy,” Jim quips back at Holmes. The man with the UMP isn’t talking, not even to tell them to be quiet. He’s covered head to toe in shrouding black cloth like a burka, sunglasses over his eyes. Sebastian can’t tell a damn thing about him. Even the term _he_ is dubious – it could be anything under that hood, gender, race, history. Impossible to even tell where he’s got his weight sitting, where he’ll move next and when he’ll be off balance.

Whoever has captured them knew exactly what they were up against.

The man with the UMP does mean business, though. He motions again. Sebastian takes a quick step back and to the left, his elbow knocking against Sherlock’s.

“Lovely to see the terrorists are sorting by height, now,” Sherlock adds. Sebastian can hear the fraying of nerves at the edges of his voice. “Going for matched sets?” Across the room, John shakes his head – just a fraction. Sebastian isn’t sure if it’s meant as reassurance or deterrent. Usually John is an open book, all soft spots like the inside of someone’s stomach, but right now his face is blank and set.

_Well, he was a soldier, after all. We train for this._

Sebastian’s eyes flick between John and Jim.  John’s face may be hard to read but his body language is screaming, _get me out of here._ Jim in contrast stands easy; weight placed on his toes so he’s ready to move, elbows pointed slightly forward to give them momentum down. John’s teeth grind together; Jim has a breathless smile on his lips. He winks at Sebastian, dark eyes large and inscrutable. Sebastian nods grimly back.

_If I didn’t know you I’d think you were enjoying this._

But there’s betraying tension coiled in Jim’s chest. His easy posture is forced. He can’t quite manage to stay still. His hips sway, back and forth, a few inches of hypnotic movement to either side as he shifts off excess energy. Most tellingly, his eyes never leave Sebastian’s face; intent and nearly unblinking.

Jim is terrified.

The man with the gun motions Jim and John to turn one way, Sebastian and Sherlock the other. In front of them are two heavy doors, two shadowy hallways. The doors are some remnant of the Cold War – thick studded steel, utilitarian and ponderous with their weight. Once they shut, the hallways will be two separate worlds. Sebastian tries to glance at Jim, but Sherlock is in the way. It doesn’t matter, really. He can feel Jim’s attention like a magnifying glass on a line of ants, dead-focused on the problem ahead of them.

_Separation._

_Don’t worry,_ Seb wants to say, _I’ll kill every living thing in my way, until I’m back to you._ He takes his first step down the right hallway – John down the left, Sherlock and Jim behind them like echoes or shadows. Sebastian doesn’t know how Sherlock’s looking at him, but he can just _picture_ Jim’s scowl at John’s back.

This is the point where goodbyes should be said, but there’s an eerie silence broken only by their footsteps and the faint, far-off sounds of great masses of metal shifting under their own weight. Sebastian isn’t about to be the first to break it.

_Seems pointless, anyways._

Another step down the hallway.

_Why say goodbye?_

Two inches of solid steel between him and Jim, now.

_It’s no problem. They don’t really think they can hold us…_

_Do they?_

_\-------------_

Tak tak thump. Tak tak thump. Tak tak thump.

Tak tak –

“Will you _stop_ that?”

Sebastian doesn’t know where Holmes got the tiny rubber ball, but the noise of it bouncing off the wall is driving him _nuts._

“I’m thinking. It helps me think.”

Tak tak thump.

“I will break your neck. It will not help you think.”

Tak tak thump. Tak tak thump. Tak tak –

“ _Holmes!_ ”

\- thump.

They’re sitting in a tiny cell, featureless except for a single window in the massive door. Just one of many doors in a seemingly unending hallway, lit by a swinging light bulb outside. Shadows shift and play over Sherlock, making the bounce of his tiny squash-ball near impossible to see but still, torturously, _audible._

“Why were you _here_ , anyways?” Sherlock spits at Sebastian. “This is a minor lead, not worth bothering with really – almost convinced myself I could send John alone. So why – are – you – “

Tak _thump_.

Sebastian snatches the ball out of mid-air. “I said _stop_.”

“I heard you. I was just waiting for you to say something a little less boring and obvious.”

It’s like someone’s reading Jim’s script, only dead-pan where Jim’s manic. Sebastian has to stop for a moment, and breathe. He squeezes the squash ball hard in his palm, wishing it would pop.

_Jim would tell me not to tell Holmes anything._

_But at the moment, I don’t **have** Jim. All I have is – _

**_Someone reading my script, Tiger, figure it out._ **

Sebastian sighs and tosses the ball back. Sherlock catches it easily. “It’s not important why we’re here, is it? Only that we are. And that they’ve got Jim. And your Watson.”

“Oooh, you’re going to propose an _alliance,_ ” Sherlock purrs, a deep rumble like a gloating jungle cat.

Sebastian grits his teeth. “They’ve obviously tried to split brains and brawn. Knowing we’d never work together.”

Sherlock hums speculatively. The light-bulb outside swings them into darkness, but Sebastian hears Sherlock settle backwards in the rustle of clothes.

“Army,” he says, finally. “Obviously. High ranking – an officer, perhaps, but definitely _ex_ , seeing your current occupation. Exact placement is even easier – that rifle case they took from you wasn’t exactly holding the regular supplies of an infantry man. Monogrammed case means you must have taken some pride in your work, and with Jim trusting you the way he does, oh, you _are_ talented, aren’t you? The facial scars from a large cat restrict where you must have served – but that’s not what we’re concerned with now. The way Jim watched you while we were processed was very telling, wasn’t it – not to mention that you borrowed his razor this morning. Living together, then – not just brawn I think. And those callouses on your fingers – a writer, are we, when we’re not a sniper? Does Jim know you write him love poetry, or do you hide it out of the house?”

“I burn it,” Sebastian admits. “Do you always talk this much?”

There’s a short silence as Sherlock considers him. Sebastian stares right back, too used to genius to be put off by it now.

“Oh, why not,” Sherlock concedes. “There must be _some_ good you can do if Jim thinks you’re worth keeping.”

\-----------------

The instant they’re in the cell Moriarty has him shoved against a wall.

“Stop – stop,” John grunts out, trying to shove him off. He’s not particularly gentle, but Moriarty is hard to get a hold of – slipping and twisting out of grip as soon as John thinks he’s pinned.

Moriarty’s breath is hot on John’s ear as he hisses, “Be a good little Doctor, _don’t move_ ,” but when he can’t find a weapon or cell phone he steps almost immediately back.

“I was _searched,_ you know,” John snarls at him.

“Of _course_ you were,” Moriarty drawls, with a condescending smile. “But I’m generally _better_ at that then most people. Thought you might have a little surprise for me, Johnny-boy.”

“No. No surprises. Nope.” John’s fist works, nerves, and he can see Moriarty’s eyes flick down to it. That crocodile smile gets wider. John grits his teeth. He’s forcing himself not to weigh the satisfaction of punching Moriarty against the danger of pissing off a murderous genius locked in a small room with nothing to do.

_Probably a bad bet, in the long run._

“I _gathered._ ” Moriarty stretches out on the hard prison bed of their cell and smiles dazzlingly up at John. “Now – since we’re in such a _per-_ dick-ca-ment –“

“No. Whatever you’re about to say, no.”

Moriarty laughs, bright and pleased, and rolls over to his stomach, kicking his heels in the air. “But you didn’t even _listen._ ”

“I’m not going to – to do anything for you, or help you, or – whatever you’re going to say. No.”

Even as John says it he feels a sinking feeling in his gut. Moriarty uncoils from the bed, smiling. The way he moves is like a small bird; constant, always fidgeting, always needing more stimulus.

It reminds John of Sherlock when Sherlock doesn’t have a case, and doesn’t that make John _sick._

“Here’s the thing, Johnny-boy,” Moriarty drones, “Here’s the _game._ There’s you and me and Sher _lock_ and _Tiger_. Now we’ve gone and got ourself locked away by some bad, bad men.” He shakes his head, clicking his tongue, but his unblinking eyes never leave John’s face. “And they’re going to do some real _naughty_ things to us if we can’t get free. _Especially_ Sherlock.”

When John opens his mouth to speak Moriarty’s face contorts like the footsteps of a demon are tracking over it.

“They’re going to _flay_ him if we don’t get out,” Moriarty hisses. John freezes in place. “They’re going to _break_ him before they cut your _throat_ and then where will poor _Mary_ be with the _baby_?”

The words set John’s stomach on fire. Rage gives him the strength to move. He raises his fist and demands, “Don’t you – don’t you _dare_ – say a word about Mary to –“ but Moriarty just smiles, serene and untouchable. The bloody psycho is _right_ , after all. John’s throat feels dry and tight. He glances around the cell, looking anywhere but at Moriarty, just so the madman can’t leer in his face while he thinks.

Only one conclusion John can come to.

_Mary, and the baby… and Sherlock._

_I have to get out of here somehow._

“Right, then.”

“Sorry? Didn’t quite hear you, Johnny boy.”

John wants to kill Moriarty so badly he can taste it like a hangover in his throat. “I said, _right,_ then. I’ll work with you. Just till we get out of here.”

“Oh,” Moriarty says, deadpan. “ _Goody._ ”

\-----------------


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The cell is approximately five steps long. Three steps wide. Driving Sebastian mad._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Six hours in to solitary confinement and Sebastian hasn't murdered Sherlock yet. He considers that an achievement. In fact, the detective might not even be as unsympathetic as Sebastian originally thought. Meanwhile, in another cell, Jim Moriarty's worked out a way to escape. All John has to do is tell the criminal mastermind what he and Sherlock were doing poking around the old bunker in the first place...

The cell is approximately five steps long. Three steps wide. Driving Sebastian mad.

An hour ago Sherlock stretched out on the hard cot, snapped at Sebastian not to bother him anymore, and shut his eyes. Since then he’s been dead to the outside world ( _especially_ Sebastian) with his long fingers steepled under his chin and his mouth set in a pout. At least it meant he had to abandon the rubber ball. That went rolling off somewhere over the concrete floor, and Sebastian is trying hard not to think about it getting underfoot. He’d really hate to kill Holmes while the man is sleeping, especially since they’d _just_ made a truce.

_Plus Boss would probably be pissed._

_I get the feeling this isn’t a ‘poetic ending.’_

Five steps forward. Five steps back.

Holmes twitches, so violently it's audible.

_Myoclonic jerk? Is he asleep?_

Sebastian wheels around on his heel and peers across the murky darkness at the shadowy figure on the cell’s single bunk. The light in their cell, never stable enough to allow Sebastian’s eyes to adjust, drapes everything in thick drab brown like the bottom of a cesspool.

“Holmes?” he says.

Nothing. The detective’s body shudders in the dimness, silent and unresponsive.

Sebastian snorts.

Five steps forward. Five steps back.

\---------------

After they’ve been in the cell for about six hours (which makes it nearly one in the morning; Sebastian’s internal clock, after years of working for Jim, is _mercilessly_ accurate) the light outside goes off completely.

The cell is abruptly a wall of impenetrable darkness. _“_ Naptime,” Sebastian quips, knocking his head back against the door wearily. No response, of course. For the past five hours the detective hasn’t moved at all except to shake.

Sebastian hopes he’s having nightmares.

\---------------

At four am there’s a soft sound in the darkness, like bones knocking together. It wakes Sebastian from his fitful sleep, and he rolls over on the ground to put his back to the bunk.

“Shut the fuck up,” he growls, half unintelligible with sleep, and hugs his jacket tighter around him.

No response.

\---------------

Five am. A low moan, tortured and wanting.

_Jim!_

Sebastian comes awake and on his feet in an instant. It takes him a moment to even recognize his cell-mate, he’s so sure the sound was Boss. Sherlock is jammed upright in the corner of the bed, knees tight to his chest. He hugs himself protectively and glares at Sebastian, biting his lip to keep from making another sound. Sebastian stares back. Sweat pours off Sherlock in thick sheets. His face is pale and drawn, shadowy circles around his eyes like he’s been awake for days even though Sebastian knows he’s been sleeping almost constantly.

“ _Withdrawal.”_

“Shut up.”

“You were _using_.”

“Shut _up!_ ”

\---------------

“Jim picked you as an equal, of all the people in the fucking world, and you’re just some ordinary scum-bag junkie.”

“Oh like _you’d_ know all about _ordinary,_ ” Holmes snipes back, but his heart clearly isn’t in it. He clutches harder at his elbows, trembling violently. “Why don’t you just go back to _pining_ and leave me in _peace?_ ”

“You’re supposed to be getting us out of here.”

“I’ll _do_ it,” Holmes hisses. “Leave me _alone!_ ” His jaw snaps sharply shut on the last syllable. Then Holmes’s face contorts in several shades of agony before he leans over and spits blood onto the floor.

“Bit your tongue?” Sebastian asks, sweetly. Holmes glares at him.

They’re not likely to get any more sleep, now.

Holmes’ teeth chatter in the dark. The light swings back in forth in the hall, trailing shadows over his face. Sebastian sighs and gets to his feet, pulling off his coat.

“Come here.”

“What? No.”

So Sebastian goes to him. He clambers on to the bunk, ignoring the way Sherlock shrinks away from him, and wraps his jacket around the other man’s skinny limbs.

“What happened to your coat, anyways?” Sebastian asks. Sherlock tries to struggle away, but the withdrawals have drained all his strength and it’s not hard to hold him in place.

When he’s exhausted, Sherlock mumbles, “They took it,” sounding all the world like a frustrated five-year-old. Sebastian is familiar with both the tone and the scuffle. Jim loves a grumpy mumble, when there hasn’t been anything good to do in a couple days and he’s alternately jumpy and sulking. He fights like this, too; limbs weak from forgetting to eat, bony elbows digging in spitefully at pressure points, fingers scrabbling on Sebastian’s skin.

Seb pulls the jacket tight around Sherlock and holds him close, ignoring the dampness of sweat, in an attempt to raise the man’s body-heat.

“Psychological, then. They must think you’re attached to it.”

Sebastian gets silence in response, but then, he’s expecting that. The silence is hard, though. Without the detective’s voice it’s hard to avoid all the ways Sherlock is reminding Seb of Jim.

The light swings, the shadows twist off Sherlock’s limp curls. The cell is featureless and unforgiving. Sebastian waits for Sherlock to speak.

“Why are you doing this?”

Seb should have expected that. “Let me tell you a story,” he says, “About Jim.”

\---------------

Jim when there isn’t work is a bag of dynamite, he’s an atomic bomb, he’s a shot-gun on a string pointed at the door when Sebastian comes in.

He jitters and shakes across the floor, pulling his hair out in clumps, slapping Sebastian’s hands away when Seb tries to calm him. He leaves the knives out. He leaves the gun cage unlocked. He orders extravagant things, pays too much, calls and cancels but doesn’t get his money back.

Sebastian comes home to the flat strewn with wrapping paper and incomprehensible machinery. Sebastian comes home to the walls covered in crayon star charts. Sebastian comes home to burnt food, to bathtubs overflowing with potassium hydroxide, to Jim with his hands cut open and bleeding.

“ _Fix it,_ ” Jim hisses, and Sebastian does.

Sebastian comes home to an empty needle, but only once.

When Jim sobers up, he says sullenly, “It didn’t help,” and what he means is _I’m sorry_. Sebastian doesn’t care, as long as Jim doesn’t do it again.

Jim mewls in the night like a wounded animal, like a songbird in a cage. If Sebastian mentions it in the morning Jim beats him bloody and doesn’t explain why.

Jim finds work.

The house doesn’t make sense but at least it’s not a nightmare. He brushes his hair back, he fixes his Westwood suit in the mirror for an hour, he talks madcap plans with his fingers dancing through the air and his face taking on a thousand roles.

“Follow along,” he sings, as he dances out the door, and Sebastian does.

\---------------

Sherlock falls asleep in Sebastian’s arms.

Sebastian sighs, and leans his head back against the wall.

**_Fix it. Come find me._ **

_I will._

\---------------

“Follow along.”

“What? No.”

“Come _on,_ Johnny-boy, it’s part of the game. _Follow along._ Now. _Fiiiiiirst_ of all. Whatever were you doing here?”

John sits with his back to the door and glares at Jim, face feeling heavy and stern. Moriarty smiles dazzlingly back from the cot. “Nothing. We weren’t doing anything.”

“Oh, _ugh_ ,” Moriarty groans, letting his head drop backwards in disgust, “Don’t be so touching. I’m not going to _kill_ anyone just by knowing what you were sneaking around for, I mean, not _immediately._ I’m just trying to make conversation, lighten the _mood._ ” He leans towards John, clasping his hands right-over-left in his lap, head snapping back forwards again. His attention feels grimy and thick, and the uncertain light only makes it worse; making his face alternately shadow and pale like a corpse. “Follow along. I’ll make it easy for you. Tell me what you were doing here…”

The last syllable drags out over the silence between them. John screws his hand into a fist and counts to ten, refusing to ask what the end of the sentence is. Moriarty’s obviously dying to tell him anyways.

“…And I’ll let us back out again.”

John tries and fails not to blink in surprise.

Moriarty grins at him, then mimics the face back – surprisingly well. John can recognize his own expression as it dances over the criminal’s face, and Moriarty gasps in mock amazement. “ _Ah!_ What? Can the big bad _Moriarty_ get us out of here?” John scowls. Moriarty smiles wider, showing small white teeth like out of place pearls. “Play my game and find out. At least it’s not _boring._ ”

John stays rigid still on the floor. “No.”

“ _Well._ ” Jim huffs and, in a fit of disappointment, throws himself back on the cot. He stretches, catlike and writhing, the front of his suit tight over the bones of his ribs. He’s startlingly skinny, up close, when John has the time to look. “I am a _teensy_ bit disappointed. I could do it, Johnny, I really could.”

Moriarty lets his head fall sideways, staring unblinkingly at John. A stray lock of hair drifts over his eyes. They seem dark and bottomless, twin black holes with only a single pinprick of light.

“Don’t you want to see Mary and the baby again?”

John, unable to take his gaze, turns his face away.

Moriarty laughs.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's got a head full of nightmares and a prison cell full of Jim Moriarty. If that doesn't drive him mad, the mysterious case that brought him and Sherlock here DEFINITELY will.
> 
> What's a good doctor to do?

In the dark, slender fingers wrap around John’s wrist.  He founders upwards from a dream in which he’s drowning, in which he’s fallen into a devouring khaki-and-camo sea.

Moriarty is sitting on the floor, mouth pressed into an expressionless slash like a flatline. He’s holding John’s wrist, staring steadily. It’s hard to make him out in great detail. The light outside their cell has dimmed, casting everything dark, and all that’s visible is the highlights of things. Moriarty’s hair. The luminous white of his skin.

 _When did I get on the cot?_ John thinks hazily.

“You were screaming,” Moriarty says, voice deep and slow and round.

_I was dreaming._

John’s pulse beats, supernaturally amplified by the pressure of Moriarty’s fingers against his vein. He tries to pull free but he’s still limp with sweat and terror.

“You were dreaming,” Moriarty repeats. “But you’re not in the war. You’re not. You’re here.”

\---------------

_You’re here._

If Moriarty mentions it in the morning John’s going to break his nose.

But in the dark, the words are a secret friend. _I’m here. And even here is better, even here is safer._ John doesn’t try to break Moriarty’s grip a second time, relaxing defeatedly into it. Moriarty nods, expression steady, and squeezes John tight before he bounces to his feet and stalks over to the wall by the door.

There he sits, turns his head away, and whistles like a bomb dropping.

Then nothing. Silence.

John stares at Moriarty’s averted face and can’t think of anything to say. _I’m here,_ he repeats to himself. Moriarty looks like a blank screen, an empty house, uninhabited and wooden. John rolls over to his other side, turning his back to the room. He breathes in deep and lets it out slow. _I’m here._

This time when he falls asleep, mercifully, he dreams of nothing but an endless darkness like a black hole.

\---------------

“We were on a case.” The changing light doesn’t bother John. It’s already bright when he’s awoken by a loud and persistent sound. Jim, back-flat on the floor, is pounding at the door with his heels, hands linked merrily behind his head.  “Now will you bloody well stop? You’re going to sprain something and I am _not_ treating you.”

Like that’s a trigger, Moriarty pushes himself off the door in a blink, leaping up and rounding on John. His hair’s looking a little mussed after a night confined and he has to shove it impatiently out of his face before he speaks. “What sort of a _case,_ try to remember. It’s _important._ ”

“Why’sit important? I don’t understand –“

Moriarty hisses in frustration and spins away again. It’s oddly graceful, especially since he’s barefoot and in shirtsleeves. His suit jacket is meticulously folded away on the bunk, out of the dirt, along with his polished shoes and pristine tie. “Just _tell me what I need to knooooow!_ ” he sings, sarcastic and venomous.

“Um – “ John doesn’t really remember, to be honest. It _hadn’t_ been terribly important. Things had just been, well, _awkward_ at home, and Mary had been testy, so when Sherlock had said – _it’s terribly dangerous, can’t do it on my own, I’ll meet you at St. Barts in five –_ he’d just sort of… gone. “A murder, I think.”

“A _murder,_ you _think._ You can do better than that. I know you can.”

“A – a secretary. At the home office. Her body was…”

“ _Displayed,_ ” Moriarty supplies. He stops moving. A beat of absolute, frozen stillness, where he looks like a statue, then he rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. “And who did she work for?” He sounds like he knows the answer.

“Some undersecretary of a minor functionary…”

Moriarty looks back over his shoulder, just a hair, just enough so his eyelashes are framed in silhouette. “That’s not truuuuuue. And we both know it.”

Sherlock had said, _a functionary in a minor position in the British government,_ and John had thought, _I’ve heard this before_. They’d both known Sherlock was lying but neither of them had fought it.

“And _what,_ ” Moriarty smiles, “ _Has_ dear Mycroft been up to?”

\---------------

“God knows.” Sherlock scans the surface of the lock with his magnifying glass, then thrusts a hand backwards out to John. “Hand me the needle-nose pliers.”

“Sherlock, we can’t just _break in –_ “

“Yes, we can. And look! We are! _Astounding._ ” He snaps his fingers impatiently. “It’s only a nuclear fall-out bunker, John, not the end of the world – well, not the end they envisioned, anyways. Government property, yes, of course, we’ll be in and out before they know it.” He wiggles his fingers. _Still waiting._

John reluctantly thumps the pliers against Sherlock’s palm. His neck itches. He can’t seem to stop nervously glancing over his shoulder.

“Fantastic.” Sherlock shoves the magnifying glass back in his pocket and goes to work on the lock.  There’s no one else in the maintenance tunnels, of course. They’re so deep under London now that they’re even off the loony train bloke’s maps. Above Sherlock’s bowed head, in radiant yellow, a warning sign reads _Danger! Keep Out! High Voltage! Government Property!_ as if the excitable typesetter couldn’t decide which threat was most important.

“Why are we doing this again?”

“It’s promising.”

“You said it was barely a six not ten minutes ago!”

“Yes, I lied. At least an eight. Maybe a nine. Ah! Got it.” The lock clicks open and Sherlock swings the door wide. The light from John’s torch falls into a rusted tunnel that stretches forebodingly off into the dark. Water drips from the low ceiling, hitting exposed pipe with a plink-and-click sound that echoes back and forth off the walls.

“We should definitely _not_ be doing this.”

“Absolutely not,” Sherlock agrees smartly, already three steps down the hallway. “I’ll see you when I come back, then. _Ta._ ” He tucks his hands into his pockets as he strides off into the black, half-stooping so he doesn’t knock his head against the ceiling. The edges of his coat nearly brush the walls. John curses and scrambles after him, fumbling with the flashlight so the light bobs and weaves around Sherlock’s shoulders. “In-and-out, John. Before they know it…”

\---------------

“So he didn’t _say.”_

“No.”

Moriarty pulls a face. “Shame. I _was_ going to get you out of here.” He rocks on his heels and shrugs his shoulders, as if to say  - _well, so much for that._

“I told you what we came for, so –“

“You didn’t tell me _anything._ ” Moriarty’s bare toes trace spirals over the dirty cement floor as he turns yet again. He straightens his shirt with an angry yank, making one of the buttons (hanging only by a desperate thread) jump and sway. The hollow of his throat seems improbably deep, his collar-bones clean and stark. When he screws up his face to pout there’s a twitch in his temple to mark his pulse. “Bland old ordinary murders aren’t a _nine_ on their own. If Sherlock wants a lovely little corpse to puzzle over he just has to come texting to _me_ and I’ll give him _twenty_. One body. One killer. _Booooring._ ”

John frowns but Moriarty’s on a roll now. He raises up on the pads of his feet and comes prowling over to John, thumbs hooked in his belt-loops. “Do you know what he saw then, Doctor Watson? It’s a _riddle._ A _test._ What cheese made Sherly  run all the way to the end of the maze?”

“I – I don’t know.”

“I’ll give you a hint, since you’re playing along so well.” Moriarty nods up over John’s shoulder, pointing rudely with his chin in the way of hoodies and half-feral children. John turns.  High in the corner of the ceiling and walls there’s a glint like one piece of masonry, one snippet of brick, has been just a little more polished than the rest.

“What – is that – a _camera?_ ” John catches the first strains, quiet and delicate, of Brahms Lullaby; Moriarty whistles them, looking away with his eyebrows raised.  Up in the ceiling the camera glints, a solitary star. “What the _hell?_ ”

He looks to Moriarty, but Moriarty just shrugs and smiles and says, _“Sherringford.”_

\---------------

Sherlock is awake before Sebastian, but he doesn’t bother trying to move away. Sebastian knows this because when he finally groans and blinks the sleep from his eyes, he’s aware of only two things: One, he’s got a crick in his neck like the devil’s biggest dildo and two, he’s got a lapful of the _wrong_ angry genius. Sherlock is glaring up from within Sebastian’s protective embrace with eyes so cold and merciless they look like the frost on frozen steel. His curls are dishevelled and the jacket Sebastian’s holding around him doesn’t seem to be doing much good in the way of warm-and-cozy.

Sebastian lets go in a hurry. Sherlock immediately hurls himself to the other side of the bed in a huff. Seb is instantly and forcefully reminded of Lydia Bennet. Or maybe it’s Eeyore? The way Sherlock curls around himself like a storming teenage girl would be funny, if Seb felt just a little less sick to his stomach.

 _Woke up with my arms around the Virgin, that’s a new fucking low._ He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, trying without much success to stretch out a night of sleeping on it bad.

“You talk in your sleep,” Sherlock snaps accusingly.

Sebastian takes a moment to gape at his back in abject horror.

“…What did I say?”

One of Sherlock’s shoulders raises and lowers moodily, the only motion he’ll allow himself in his sulk. “John,” he says begrudgingly, “Has nightmares as well.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian and Sherlock are facing down the barrel of withdrawal. It's going to be a long night, but Sebastian is /not/ going to start it by whining about his nightmares. Meanwhile, John's trying to get to the bottom of the very British-sounding mystery Jim's given him - what the fuck does "Sherringford" mean?
> 
> Too bad Jim's a little preoccupied with his memories.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Why not? We’ve nothing else to do. Might even be funny.”

“It’s my own stupid crap. Besides – what the fuck. I’m not whining about my dreams to _you_.” Sebastian flops over onto his back on the floor, rolling his eyes. One hand cushions his head from the unforgiving concrete. The ceiling is a dingy shade of green-grey; not quite snot and not quite algae. Personally, Sebastian thinks he hacks up nicer-looking things whenever he smokes too much.

He takes as deep a breath as he can, letting air swell his ribcage until he feels like he’s going to crack. Seb can almost _feel_ Holmes watching. He’s been sitting opposite Sebastian with his back to the cot for almost half an hour now, eyes narrow and calculating in his pale face. He’s sweating so heavily he’s ruined his shirt. Withdrawals have only just started. Sebastian almost feels bad for him; Sherlock must know damn well it’s not going to be fun from here on in. Although, reading between the lines, Sebastian would guess it hasn’t been _fun_ for a while. When he looks over the track marks are dark against Sherlock’s rolled-up sleeves; if the average dose of heroin is about 200mg then the total present in Sherlock’s system could be as much as –

“It will give me something to take my mind off things,” Sherlock crosses his arms, settling moodily against the cot, and Sebastian loses the mental math he’s doing. He glares at Sherlock for screwing him up, and Sherlock makes a face back. “Oh, come on. You’re certainly aware of _my_ little _pressure points,_ as Magnusson would have said.”

The name comes out of left field like a slap. Suddenly the floor is uncomfortable. Seb’s muscles are restless. He has to move or he’ll _lose_ it. He bounds up to his feet and over to the door without saying anything, hands clenched tight at his sides. With his back to the room he can rap his knuckles against the ledge of the small window, and pretend that he’s escaped the conversation.

_Have you heard, they’re saying he’s lost. The genius outsmarted._

_Have you heard, the Virgin’s been arrested._

“Oh,” Holmes says quietly, “ _Oh._ You were watching.” Sebastian turns from the door. Sherlock’s picking nervously at his track marks. His fingernails are dirty and split, but he smiles upwards as airily as a prom queen anyways - trying to look like he’s not suffering. “I don’t have to wonder how much did it _killed_ you to see me _beaten._ When Jim had tried _so_ hard…” Sebastian’s eyes narrow, but even though Sherlock’s words are harsh his smile isn’t exactly _cruel._ It’s not that he wants to pick Sebastian open. He just can’t help it – seeing a weakness for him is like a dog set on a rat; the ending is inevitable. “You didn’t know he was alive, that’s apparent. Well, and why would he tell you? You’d be no use to him. What does a dead man need with a sniper? Better to let you hold the fort on your own, wasn’t it. Believing him dead… Writing your little _poems…_ ”

That one hurts.  “You don’t know what it was like for him. He had to – he was _forced_ – ”

To Sebastian’s surprise, Sherlock’s smile falters. A new expression takes its place, something melancholy and a little bit ugly but more honest than the smile could ever be. “Oh, but I _do_ understand, though. In fact I think I might know better than anyone what it was like for him...” Sherlock is looking at Sebastian like a komodo dragon looks at the people outside its enclosure. It’s like he’s staring through Sebastian to something larger, or like Sebastian isn’t there at all. “We were always very similar, Jim and I. Even in the end. The best fights are always with yourself, after all…”

\---------------

“And who the hell is _Sherringford?_ ”

“Mmmm… if Sherly didn’t let you in on the secret, I’m certainly not going to.”

“Sherlock wouldn’t keep something important from me. He’d tell me. If I needed to...” John trails off, and then, defensively, adds. “He certainly bloody well wouldn’t tell you.”

Jim just raises his eyebrows.

“He would _not_!”

“Do you know what it’s like to be empty? To just go on _going_ , just _on._ When there’s not a thing in the world that can make you do anything you don’t want to do. That’s boring. And boredom will kill you, will it _ever_.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting that Sherlock and you had some sort of… connection?” John laughs incredulously, but to his appalled surprise, Jim nods. He looks thoughtful.

“Sherly was wonderful. He really was. He was the only thing in the whole world that could _make_ me. You’re ordinary. You really don’t have any idea what it’s like, in the end. You don’t know how it feels for him and I.” A grin replaces Jim’s thoughtful expression, quick and cruel like frost. “Do you think maybe that’s why he likes me _better?_ ”

\---------------

“Put the cigarette out.”

 Jim pushes himself off the brick wall with his shoulder blades, swaying to his full height. Not that it’s _much,_ comparatively, but _still._ He takes a drag of his smoke, insouciant, and raises a hand to shield his eyes. There’s a shadow at the end of the alley.

“That you, dear?” Jim drawls. The streetlight behind Sherlock is bright as day compared to the alley. Jim can only make out a silhouette – a curve of curls, a slash of shoulders, a sweep of coat.

“I said, put it out,” Sherlock growls. He’s scowling, Jim can just _tell._ He can feel the cadence of Sherlock’s voice like a scratch in advance; telling Jim where, later, Sherlock’s nails will dig in. “John’s insisting that I quit.”

One day Jim’s hoping Sherly will be mad enough to scratch out his eyes. “And we’d just hate to upset _John_.” Jim toes the cigarette down until it’s nothing but soggy tobacco leaves, gold against the soaked concrete. Then he spreads his arms, as if inviting Sherlock to make an inspection.  “Well? Am I a good boy? Go-on, then. Say I’ve been a good boy.”

Sherlock hesitates in the mouth of the alley. Jim smiles until his face starts to hurt. Sherlock is waiting for Jim to _push_. Going to Jim’s is never _Sherlock’s_ idea; Sherlock takes great care never to act willing (As if Jim had ever needed to _force_ anyone!). But the desire is there in how he buttons his coat, in the smell of his hair, in the way he steals Jim’s cigarettes afterwards and smokes in the dark like a thief.

_I do wonder sometimes if Mycroft can read it._

_Does Big Brother know what you get all wet for?_

_“_ Sherlock,” Jim continues – pleasantly, there’s no need to be rude when they both want the same thing – “Tell me how good I’ve been, or I’ll detonate the bomb under Baker Street.”

They go back to Jim’s.

In the cab he straddles Sherlock – leaving sneaker smudges on the leather seats. Sherlock’s hair is soft between Jim’s fingers, just a little oily. He’s forgotten to wash, and he smells like ozone and mercury. Jim doesn’t mind; he sees the oil and ozone seeping through his fingerprints like ink, staining them the same colour as Sherlock’s eyes. He grabs a handful of hair and pulls Sherlock’s head backwards. Sherlock’s mouth is open, just slightly, and his eyes blaze defiance like curses.

_Oh, how it must **kill** you to want me._

Sherlock’s hands dig in to Jim’s back, hard through the thin fabric of a t-shirt. No need for the Westwood tonight, not when _removal_ is going to be a priority. Besides; with Sherlock there’s always too much in the way already. Jim pulls the scarf from Sherlock’s neck with unnecessary force as punishment for overdressing – he might leave friction burns, but then, Sherlock hates making things _easy_.

Jim would never forgive him otherwise.

Sherlock goes straight for the button of Jim’s skinny jeans. Jim can’t help a giggle. It comes out a little breathless. They’ve been workingon the idea of foreplay, but it never quite seems to _stick_ with Sherlock. Before the car even gets clear of downtown London Sherlock’s got one fist wrapped around Jim’s cock and –

 _Oh._ Well. _That_ should certainly be illegal.

Jim nips Sherlock’s ear, grinding the thin flesh between his teeth until Sherlock groans. At the top of each stroke Sherlock twists his wrist, a little flick like a conductor. His fingers are calloused from his violin strings and the texture is just a little _rough,_ just a little _wrong._ It might actually hurt if Sherlock did it just a little bit –

“ _Harder_.”

“Now now, don’t be greedy.” Sherlock manages to keep his voice level and _that_ is just _unacceptable._

Jim shifts his weight so Sherlock’s cock presses _perfectly_ against him. “Don’t tell me what to do, Sherlock Holmes,” he rumbles back, “Because we both know you’re _dying_ to have me –” Jim punctuates his words with a roll of his hips, rocking himself up into Sherlock’s hand.  “– And if you’re not a good boy, you’ll be _leaving_.”

Sherlock bites his lip as if it stands a chance of helping him hold back. The pink flesh dents oh-so-temptingly, his eyes wide and dark and his cheeks starting to flush.

_Lucky me, my job isn’t resisting temptation._

Jim leans forward and sinks his teeth into Sherlock’s lip. The taste of blood on his tongue is hot and metallic as a bullet. _Straight to the brain._ Sherlock’s grip on his cock goes tight in response and Jim can’t help himself moaning.

Things get a little _dizzy_ after that.

Jim thinks in flashes like muzzle flare. Sherlock slams the door to the cab and sweeps inside, coat over one arm, not looking back. The front hall is dark. Sebastian’s gone. Jim doesn’t even really remember where he _sent_ Sebastian, but he hopes it ends well. The button of his jeans doesn’t seem to want to do back up. Sherlock turns the corner of the landing – there’s a bruise on the nape of his neck, already dark, visible like hide-and-go-seek between his ringlet curls.

Jim surprises himself when he stops Sherlock at the door to the bedroom.

“Not there,” he says, his own voice strange in his ears.

Sherlock turns back, raising his eyebrows. His pants are flatteringly tight, and Jim’s mouth goes a little dry with want. “Something you’re hiding?”

_No, Sherly, of course not. What’s the point in that?_

“A girl’s got to have _some_ secrets.”

“We can’t lie to each other,” Sherlock tells him, taking a quick step forward so he crowds Jim back against the stair-case railing. “We’re _far_ too similar for that.”

_Yes, and I know exactly how I’m going to blow Dr. Watson’s head off._

_You expect me to trust you with Sebby?_

Jim doesn’t know what excites Sherlock more – the secrecy or the way Jim arches up against him. Sherlock pins him against the railing, eyes narrow and intent. Jim can _feel_ himself being mentally dissected. Sherlock’s eyes move down him so closely the contact is almost tangible. It’s certainly _tempting_. Jim’s finding it hard to breathe. Sherlock grinds their hips together, pressing Jim back against the hard wood of the railing, and Jim allows himself the indulgence of hanging off the edge of the deep end. He closes his eyes and pictures cutting himself to ribbons on Sherlock’s brain.

_All I’d have to do is let you in on my little secret, and you’d have enough weakness to split me open._

“Tell me,” Sherlock murmurs in his ear.

_All I’d have to do is offer you Sebastian._

_Ah, so close, and yet so far._

“It’s not _game night,_ ” Jim sing-songs back, “ _No more questions._ The spare bedroom or a ride home.”

Sherlock huffs, disappointed. He shoves away from Jim into the spare bedroom with his shoulders set in a jagged line of disapproval.

Jim grins. _Oh, I’m **such** a hardship for you._

In the spare room the curtains are drawn and Holmes doesn’t bother to turn the lights on. The darkness washes the world grey. Jim watches Sherlock undress like a sculpture being revealed from a solid block of marble, concealing clothes falling away to reveal the clean pure lines of his skin.

“Who do I have to threaten to get you to solve crimes in your pants?” he asks hypothetically.

“Shut up,” Holmes snaps over his shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”

Jim grins.

_Don’t be so impatient, darling._

He leaves his clothes all tangled up in Sherlock’s on the floor and pushes Sherlock back onto the bed. Sherlock grips at Jim’s thighs and his fingernails dig in, urging Jim on even though Sherlock keeps his expression deliberately cool. By the time Jim bites open a packet of lube, he’s sure he’s got bruises.

_Sebastian will wonder –_

But it’s best not to think about that. Jim slicks his own fingers and starts with two, straight up for his prostate without waiting. The stab of pressure sends red-hot wires through his brain. Jim shudders, and underneath him Sherlock’s curse is in harmony with his gasp.

Jim doesn’t _intend_ to put on a show – butit is a bit _sexy_ , knowing that Sherlock can deduce every motion of his fingers by the way he makes himself curse, and once he’s started it’s devilish hard to stop. Jim’s got a bit of a soft spot for making Sherlock watch as he fucks himself on his fingers. The way Sherlock’s eyes make him feel barer than naked drives Jim absolutely mad. His fingers stroke over his prostate, Jim moans, and Sherlock’s rapt attention splits him down to the core. For once, he’s actually _vulnerable_. Sherlock’s hands slide up to his hips and Jim squirms on his own fingers.

_Better get a third in soon or I’m going to make myself come before Sherlock can._

The pressure of the third nearly knocks him over. He has to lean forward and brace himself on Sherlock’s chest. The only audible sounds are Sherlock’s panting, the slick movements of Jim’s fingers, and a series of small hopeless moans that – _whoops –_ must be coming from Jim.

“That’s enough,” Sherlock growls. He catches Jim’s wrist and pulls his fingers roughly away. Jim moans, but Sherlock doesn’t even hesitate.

No more thoughts of punishing him, now. No more power games. Now the world has narrowed, focusing down to Sherlock’s hands and the tip of his cock pressing slick against Jim. Jim’s mind’s gone worryingly quiet, devoid of all rational thought in a way he never seems to manage on his own. Sherlock rocks upwards, just an inch into him and Jim babbles something – it might be begging but who’s counting? Jim doesn’t care who wins anymore. He just _wants._

Sherlock slams the rest of the way up into him all at once. Jim keens.  It’s too much, too big, too fast. He feels himself coming apart at the seams, and Sherlock doesn’t even _pause._ He fucks up into Jim viciously, fingers digging in so Jim is completely transfixed. Jim pushes himself back so Sherlock fits just the right spot inside him, arching his spine until he’s being fucked so deep the breath is driven out of him. Through his half-shut eyes he can see Sherlock’s curls spread out beneath them on the pillow, a cloud of velvet that smells more like pre-cum than ozone.

“Oh – fuck –das’sit, Sherly – “

Jim’d curse the inescapable Irish accent but it hardly seems the time – not when Sherlock is holding him so hard into each thrust, not when he’s growling and clawing and so _obviously_ not in control. Jim has barely enough brain cells left to enjoy seeing Sherlock give in. He laughs, breathless, as Sherlock’s thrusts make his neck snaps backwards –

But there’s no time to be triumphant. Sherlock wraps a fist around Jim’s cock and – Fuck. _Fuck,_ oh _fuck, oh **fuck** –_

Jim cries out and sags forward, riding a wave of perfect white oblivion. He floats, dizzy. Strength seeps from his muscles. The warm complacent glow of orgasm infuses him like it was injected straight into his brain.

He barely feels the last thrusts ragdoll through him as Sherlock finishes and shoves him to one side. The world feels hollow and far away.

_That’s… nice._

Jim’s brain takes a while to reboot, starts up slow like an old computer. He lies on his side in the bed and watches with heavy eyes as Holmes steals his cigarettes.

For some reason, all he can think about is Sebastian.

_He’s been worrying lately. I should pencil in a time to tell him I’m almost done._

_One way or another someone’s about to get cut from the show._

_I wonder if that will help things?_

The cigarette lights Sherlock’s face, an orange-and-red glow that’s the only colour in a desaturate world.  Jim thinks of scraps of poetry alight in Sebastian’s fingers, shoved over the balcony. He’d waited in the gardens, stitched them pain-staking back together while Sebastian slept.

_What is it he said? Oh._

 “ _I loved you,_ ” Jim quotes, “ _Like the fall of Rome._ ”

 “Don’t be maudlin,” Sherlock snaps, killing his cigarette on the bedframe. “It never suited us.”

\---------------

 “Are you trying to convince me I should feel bad for you? Like you’ve ever – like you even _know what it’s like_ to be _hurt_ – “

“I do feel pain. I do. Of course I do, don’t be silly, I’m only _human._ ”

\---------------

In the dream there is Jim, and the war.

Jim is how he will be, near the end, near _Reichenbach,_ smoked-out and listless with his eyes lined in red. There’s a firefight going on, one Sebastian remembers from just outside Beirut. Jim doesn’t seem to notice. He perches on the scorched edge of a wall, cigarette hanging limp between his fingers. Sand in the wind scrapes the top of his toes raw.

“I’m beginning to think,” he says, “You can’t save me at all.”

And then Sebastian has his hands wrist deep in Jim’s entrails. He’s trying to hold Jim together but the body under him is flying apart, torn at by indiscriminate and invisible hands. Blood sprays upwards, thick and coating. Seb gags on it, hacking it out of his mouth and throat like cancer. He tries to save Jim, he dries so damn _hard,_ but he can’t see and his hands are shaking and at the end of the day he only ever makes things worse. Jim flat lines with Sebastian’s hands on his heart trying to manually restart it, and Sebastian can feel the last beat of his pulse like an accusation –

“You wouldn’t let me flick you,” Magnusson says.

“I’ve got nothing to live for.”

“But such large pressure points…” His fingers are on Jim’s still heart, between Seb’s.  “Here… here… and here…”

The body is cooling.

“What would you do to have him back, Sebastian Moran?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's withdrawals are getting dangerous; not in the way they effect Sherlock, but in the way Sebastian Moran can't help but find them familiar. After all, Sherlock is a fun house mirror of Jim - and for Seb, the line between pain and pleasure has always been a bit, well... thin.

Jim breaks Sebastian’s nose outside a bar in Moscow, by the simple expedient of slamming his face into an iron railing and walking away. His heels click on the icy pavement, fading off into the distance as Sebastian clutches at his nose. It’s so cold the blood freezes almost as soon as it hits the air. It crystalizes on Sebastian’s stubble, layers and layers of it clotting out his breath as he stumbles to their hotel.

Sebastian has to pick the lock of the room, because Jim takes the keys with him.

When Seb findally gets in Jim’s smoking in the bath, only the fringe of his mussed up hair visible over the rim of the ornate claw foot tub. The air is hot and thick and Sebastian has to pinch his nose as the blood thaws and starts to flow again. It drips down his face over the floor into the massive sink, hewn from a single slab of white marble. The hotel is some god-awful Tsarist holdover, all stone and gold and frescos. It’s expensively overdone in the worst Russian style. They always stay here, because Jim says it’s quaint. Seb hates it. He hopes his blood stains the sink.

While he checks his face in the mirror, getting ready to set his nose, Jim stands from the bathtub. He snags a towel so thick and white it’s like the inside of a cloud, and starts scrubbing himself down vigorously. A pink flush rises on his skin as Sebastian watches in the mirror.

The towel drops to the floor. Jim says, “I’m not through with you yet.”

It sounds like a question; like he’s asking permission. Sebastian looks down at his hands. Red droplets fall between his knuckles into the sink. He curls his fingers slowly into fists.

“Alright,” he says. Jim’s been bad for days.

_Least I can do._

Jim’s hand bunches in his hair, and slams his head forwards. The mirror sparkles into the sink and onto the tile, a thousand tiny fragments of light.

\---------------

In the dark Sherlock is crying.

His face is red, mottled and furious with himself for not being able to stop. He twists on the cot, trying desperately to catch his gasps between his teeth. He kicks at nothing. He tears at his track marks. And he does it all in a horrible, clawing silence, clinging to the idea that he can make it through alone.

Sebastian appreciates the familiarity of that, and the futility.

He’d been pretending to sleep on the floor, but Sherlock’s made enough noise now that he’s justified in ‘waking up.’ He rises silently, pads over to the bed, and grabs Sherlock roughly just above the elbows. Sherlock snarls between gritted teeth. Sebastian smiles to himself. God help him, he’s looking forward to what’s coming.

When he tries to pin Sherlock to the bed and Sherlock twists himself free, Sebastian is already shutting his eyes in anticipation. Sherlock’s fist slams into his cheekbone with a sharp _crack_ and knocks him back against the wall, and Sebastian nearly sighs in relief.

_Oh, God, **yes.**_

Sherlock throws punches like a drunkard, sobbing breaths hard in his throat as he smashes Sebastian into hamburger. He aims for the face, mainly, wanting to disfigure. Wanting to _break_. His form is a mess, and each time he leaves himself open Sebastian makes a tally mark – _could have killed you. Could have killed you. Could have killed you._

But that isn’t the point.

Sherlock is cursing under his breath, a low steady stream as he grabs the front of Sebastian’s shirt and slams him against the wall harder. Sebastian’s head cracks backwards on the concrete like a firework. His vision goes dim. He’s vaguely aware when Sherlock throws him to the floor, when a well-placed heel drives the breath from his lungs, when a hand wraps into his hair and slams him face-first down into the concrete so hard his nose _crunches._

The sound seems to bring Sherlock back to his senses. The blows stop. Sebastian can hear him take three stumbling steps and fall heavily onto the cot. Then, there’s silence like the end of a storm. Sebastian draws in a long, shaky breath. Now that the worst of it’s over, he lets himself curl forward into fetal position and just _feel_. His ribs scream protest, the back of his head is on fire, his nose and mouth are clogged by a thick film of blood. For a moment, Sebastian allows himself to be lost in the clarion scream of his nerve-endings.

To Sherlock it must seem like a nightmare.

Sebastian feels calm for the first time in days.

\---------------

“Sorry,” Jim says, quiet and soft. “You didn’t deserve that.”

Sebastian can’t say much of anything. He spits something out. He’s pretty sure it’s a tooth. Blot clods on his tongue, pools thick and slimy with saliva as it runs out over his lips.

“Oh _Tiger,_ ” Jim sighs, “And to think, you were so _pretty_.”

\---------------

The light bulb outside swings the cell back into dingy light. Sebastian prods gingerly at his nose. It’s already starting to swell. He can feel Sherlock’s eyes on him, wide and horrified.

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” Sebastian tells him. “Don’t bother.”

“I wasn’t going to apologize. You could have stopped me.” Sherlock slides down off the bed and crosses to Sebastian. “For god’s sake, don’t _touch_ it. You’re only going to mess things up.” He slaps Sebastian’s hands away and starts probing down the swelling, pads of his fingers clinical and unforgiving. Sebastian lets him poke.

After a moment, not meeting his eyes, Sherlock adds, “Not very smart, using a sociopath to satisfy your masochism. But then, once again, your _domestic situation_ the way it is, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised…”

“You’re not a sociopath.”

“…You would know.”

“Don’t give me that. He’s not a sociopath either.”

Sherlock, saying nothing, straightens Seb’s nose with a vicious _crack._

 ---------------

The truth of it is that sometimes Jim just needs something to break. When he can’t destroy what he’s fighting in his head, well, at least he can direct that frustration outwards. And if half of the time he takes it out on Sebastian, polite and kind never suited Seb anyways.

Jim’s never quite _remorseful_ , afterwards, and he’s certainly not _soft_. But he sits on the edge of the bathtub while Sebastian stitches his face back together, watching the mirror with steady eyes as if he’s bearing witness to a private and personal crime. 

This is the pattern of their lives.

Jim only breaks it once. It’s a Thursday in February, a dirty cold day where the snow is so polluted it looks like ash. All morning Jim’s been restless and volatile and Sebastian just _knows_ it’s going to hit the breaking point by the time they go to bed.

He’s already planning when he’ll restock the medical kit.

But six pm rolls around and he hears the door bang open, and shut and just like that Jim’s gone. Sebastian shoots off a text - < _If you need back-up let me know where to be > **-**_ but there’s nothing but silence in return.

He doesn’t bother to sleep.

He grabs a glass and the Talisker Jim brought home on Monday and sits up in the office, smoking and trying to read some trashy thriller he’d picked up at the airport in Prague. But he can’t seem to concentrate. He keeps glancing at the clock on Jim’s bookshelf, watching the hours tick by.

Nine pm. Eleven pm. One am. Four…

Sebastian falls asleep.

He wakes up to Jim pouring himself a glass of scotch and sitting on the other side of the desk. Sebastian’s leg is covered in ash fallen from the cold butt of the cigarette still dangled between his fingers. The book, now soaked in spilled scotch, lies open on the floor. Sunlight gleams off his broken glass.

“I see you waited,” Jim says. He sips his scotch and sets it on the desk. Sebastian watches the legs run down the glass, semi-translucent threads like saliva.

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t have. You’re going to be awfully _sleepy_ today. What if I need you?”

“I’ll handle myself.”

“I _hope_ so.” Jim turns his back on Seb, starts shuffling papers at the desk. His shoulders are tense and drawn. “Because I’m not _done_ with you.” There’s a bruise over his jugular, the faint but distinct lines of someone else’s teeth.

Sebastian tastes bile at the back of his mouth. “Where were you?”

“Out.”

“It didn’t help?”

“It never helps,” Jim declares, which is a blatant lie because it always helps when it’s Sebastian.  Jim won’t look up. His head dips down and away as he shuffles papers aimlessly on his desk; he’s hiding. Sebastian knows him well enough to spot it. That and a dozen other things too numerous and petty to list completely: The nervous quickness to Jim’s hands, the dull tone to his voice, the shift to his hips which he only allows himself when he’s worrying.

Jim cuts the moment of weakness almost as soon as Seb knows it’s happening, guillotine-fast. He scrubs his hands through his hair and shakes off his mood like a dog shaking off water. By the time he turns to Seb and picks up his glass again, he is all smiles. “So. Are you ready to play?” he asks pleasantly.

There are wrinkles around the corner of his mouth like stains, on his brow like a crown. His eyes are bruised. The glass in his hands shakes, enough so Sebastian can see the legs of the scotch run down like tears.

He loves Jim like his ribs are being broken inwards, piercing his heart.

Without saying anything, he stands. Jim raises his eyebrows, but as Sebastian advances his grin goes predatory and pleased. He’s so sure he knows what’s coming that he sets the glass of scotch aside and his fingers twitch in like they’re already hungry to become fists.

Seb catches his wrists and kisses him.

There’s a moment where Jim is startled and unresponsive. A pause where he’s slack. Like firecrackers on a string he comes alive in small little sparks, tremors of movement, until all at once he’s a conflagration. He writhes and twists himself free and claws into Sebastian’s back. He kisses like curses, like accusations, sharp thrusts and slides of his tongue so he doesn’t as much _match_ Sebastian as _consume_ him.

Jim knows damn well how to make sex into violence.

And if Jim wants to tear Sebastian’s clothes off, scratch his back bloody, if Jim wants to bite through his lip… Well, sweet and gentle never suited Sebastian either. He snarls into Jim’s ear, leaves bruises on him like inverse constellations or impact craters. Jim grinds his hips forward and Sebastian picks him up and deposits him on the desk, scattering scotch glasses and cigarette butts and paperwork into an inseparable mess on the floor.

Jim laughs, breathless, and the pads of his fingers drum the bone of Seb’s shoulder in amusement.

Sebastian raises his head from a kiss to Jim’s neck and realizes he can’t tell the difference between his bruises and the ones from the stranger. The piercing ache in his chest pushes a little deeper, an unsettling impalement that makes him still in Jim’s arms.

Jim twists to look at him, quizzical eyes scanning Sebastian’s face – _why have we stopped, now?_ – and just like that, Sebastian doesn’t want to be violent anymore.

_I don’t want to bruise you._

_I don’t want to hurt you._

He leans forward and kisses Jim and this time he pours something different into it for Jim to consume. Jim’s mouth is still hot and devouring, but what Seb offers back is a sweet breathless slide, no teeth, no spite, no pain. Jim snarls, not understanding. He doesn’t seem to know what to do. He bites Sebastian’s neck, vicious, going for blood; and while – _oh fuck –_ Sebastian can’t help himself moaning, there’s no answering assault. Instead Seb unwraps Jim from layers of clothing like a sacrament. He retraces the welts on Jim’s skin with soft kisses, mournful things, as if he could take back the bruising.

Jim grabs at his hair and pulls, hard, blonde strands coming out between his fingers. “What are you doing?” he demands. Sebastian ignores him.

On the inside of each of Jim’s wrists, he presses a kiss as he undoes the cuff-links. Jim trembles. “ _Stop,”_ he hisses, but Sebastian doesn’t.

When Sebastian pushes Jim back on the desk Jim rakes eight perfect parallel lines down Seb’s chest with his fingernails. He growls urgently, wrapping his legs around Sebastian’s hips, reaching up to grip Seb’s shoulders. His hands slide down, over Seb’s bicep, then Jim digs his thumb into the soft and vulnerable skin at Sebastian’s elbows.  He’s trying to hurt. His eyes are lost and confused, and Seb loves him more than anything else ever created.

Seb leans forward and kisses Jim again, carefully, and this time Jim makes a choked noise in the back of his throat that’s more than half a sob. He doesn’t bite. Sebastian kisses his collarbones, the stark lines of his ribs, his hipbones so jutting they’re like hard Roman roads under a thin surface of skin. Jim is a skeleton barely covered by substance, and if Sebastian could nourish him  -

Jim moans, breathy and broken. Sebastian presses his lips to the inside of Jim’s thigh as he pulls his trousers off, slow. Seb lets the tips of his fingers trail all the way down the inside of Jim’s legs to his feet and when he looks up, Jim has a hand high up over his head. He’s clutching at the edge of the desk. His knuckles are white. Tension stands out in his tendons, wrist to elbow, mirrored in the desperate way he’s biting at his lip.

He’s whimpering. Sebastian kisses the inside of his ankles, where bones threaten to break through on every movement.

When Jim shudders again, hips twisting against the air, Sebastian lowers himself so they fit together. He braces himself on the desk and slides an arm under Jim, warm skin separating Jim’s back from the cold wood. Jim wraps himself around Seb’s shoulders, clinging, face buried in Sebastian’s neck.

He doesn’t say anything. Maybe there’s nothing to say.

Seb rolls his hips forward and Jim rocks up to meet them. Their bodies snag and slide against each other with only pre-cum for lube, and the friction is just this side of painful. But it’s sweet. Jim’s forehead braces against the hollow of Seb’s collarbone. He makes soft hitching noises, small fragile treasures Sebastian would kill to protect.

Sebastian’s climax builds slow, like a tide. Not a desperate thing he races Jim for, not a crashing tsunami that throws him head over heels into brightness, but a golden gauze that builds over each inch of skin in contact between them. He surrenders to it slowly, retreating back to somewhere deep in his stomach until all he’s conscious of is a vast swell of pleasure overtaking him. He drifts for a moment on nothing but white.

When he’s conscious of being in his own skin again Sebastian is drenched in sweat and Jim is trembling, jerking in his arms. Jim’s hair clings to Seb’s shoulder. Sebastian keeps moving through his own climax, doesn’t stop moving until Jim cries out – wordless, needy, going tense.

He grabs the back of Sebastian’s neck, pulling him down, as if they could be any closer. As if there was any empty space left between them.

Sebastian kisses Jim’s face, his cheekbones, his eyelashes. If there are tears, Sebastian takes that to his grave.

\---------------

“You were aware, then.”

“I knew from the start I was never going to be enough for him.”

\---------------


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sherlock haven't been the same since the fall. John's not sure if he wants them to be, really. There were moments... But that's not important now. What is important is their imprisonment - Moriarty may not have been lying when he said he had a way out. Maybe now John finally stands a chance of getting to the bottom of things....

 “You expect me to believe he _slept_ with you?”

“Is it _really_ that much of a stretch?”

 Jim shrugs. John stares at him, aghast. “Of all the daft – yes, it bloody well _is_!”

“Just because _you_ couldn’t get up the balls, Johnny, doesn’t mean he was completely untouchable.”

\---------------

It is a perfect microcosm of their relationship _before_. John comes home from a long day at work and there is Sherlock, sitting on the mantle, hair shoved impatiently back out of his face. The light straining in from the windows is warm and golden, picking at the fabric of Sherlock’s dressing gown – the setting sun clings tight to the curve of his spine, drapes loose over his shoulders, clutches possessively around his hips. Sherlock has his sleeves rolled up and bunched at the elbows, to keep them out of the blood coating his forearms. It’s unusually thoughtful of him.

He’s scowling at the severed arm in his hands like it is _insisting_ on being _personally insulting._

Judging from the mess on the floor behind him, when Sherlock decided it was essential that he sit on the mantle he had simply shoved everything formerly occupying the space to the ground. Several things had apparently shattered. John has a headache already.

“Oh _excellent_ ,” Sherlock says, not smiling, not looking at him, tilting the arm as if he’s sighting down the bone. “Did you get my text?”

_Come home at once. –SH_

Received at approximately 1:00 PM, four hours into his shift. One hour into Sherlock’s day. Five hours ago now. John had been having lunch; the bite to eat he’d promised Sarah they’d have weeks ago. She took one look at him when his phone buzzed and said, sympathetically – sarcastically – _boyfriend troubles?_

“I’ve been at _work_ ,” John tries, hoping to head him off early.

“I did send two.”

_I said come home. –SH_

Sent (but not received) five minutes later; John’s phone was off at the time. He’d been quite proud of how determined about that he was. He’d even managed to ignore Sarah’s protestations that it was perfectly fine with her if he wanted to text back. Lunch had been lovely. They’d chatted the whole time, and not once had she brought up murder or asked him to do something alarming for the sake of experiment or abruptly invaded his personal space. John had been forced to the rather troubling realization that living with Sherlock had dramatically lowered his standards for pleasant conversation.

Sherlock looks up, finally, from the arm. The sun strokes along his cheekbones, snags in his eyes. He glares at John for a moment and snaps, “She’s got a new boyfriend,” then turns back to the arm, managing to look both supremely frustrated and deeply pleased with himself. “Now stop pretending to be cross and come here, I need your hands. I’ve _tried_ but I just can’t get it with only ten fingers.”

“Sorry?” There’s a special sort of ache in his temple that John immediately recognizes as the 9-Hour-Shift-and-Sherlock-ExperimentingHeadache _._ Distinct from, but not worse than, the 3-AM-On-A-Sunday-Sherlock-is-Bored Headache; and completely preferable to the Sherlock-Hasn’t-Had-a-Case-in-Two-Weeks Migraine. He heads for the kitchen to fetch the appropriate medication. In this case, tea, acetaminophen, and studious inattention to the body parts in the sink.

“You had lunch with Sarah, and you’re pretending to be upset that I interrupted because you think it will teach me some sort of _lesson_ ,” Sherlock informs him with disgust, and then spits words at him, rapid fire, unfolding in a violent motion from the mantle. “You don’t _usually_ smell of orchids. You should have been at lunch when I texted you, but you didn’t reply. So you were either working through lunch, or not alone. Orchids say _not alone._ It rained around one thirty, but the perfume didn’t wash off. Cheap perfumes – and that one _is_ cheap, John – are water soluble. You weren’t in the rain. Perhaps you took a cab? No, you took one home. Wouldn’t have paid for one twice in a day, not on your budget. So you didn’t leave work. Who’s close to your work that wears appalling perfume? Ah! Sarah’s called lately. But she wouldn’t wear perfume for you, hmmm. _And_ she’s a doctor – that means money – so the _cheap_ perfume was a gift from someone she was meeting after work. Process of elimination, clever guesswork, new boyfriend, I didn’t interrupt anything, you’re being an idiot, _come here I need your hands._ ” A deep breath follows.

John takes a second acetaminophen.

 Sherlock huffs. After a second’s thought he puts a disturbing amount of slump into his shoulders, drags himself over the counter and drapes himself artistically just behind John, dangling the severed arm perilously close to his tea. With considerable self-restraint, John manages not to turn. As a general principle, he refuses to play Sherlock’s audience at times like these.

“Jawwwwwwwwwn,” Sherlock whines, mouth screwed up, the very picture of inconsolable suffering. “ _Please._ I need you. _”_

“No,” John tells him shortly, and rescues his tea for a quick sip. He can feel Sherlock’s eyes on him go cold and calculating, dropping the desolate act.

 “It’ll save lives,” Sherlock tries, putting his “reasonable” voice on. The abrupt change in tactic is accompanied by the prickly feeling on the back of his neck that he gets when Sherlock is deducing him.

“Brilliant,” John says, “Tell me how it goes.” He’s reasonably sure that if Sherlock could bore a hole through his neck with the sheer fury behind a scowl he’d be writhing on the floor with severed vertebrae. So far, they’d covered possible murder, alarming acts for the sake of experimentation and – John turns – yes, there it was. Invasion of personal space.

Sherlock’s shoulders are squared off towards John and he’s leaning slightly forward, eyes narrowed and darting, lips pressed tight in a frown. The severed arm brushes lightly against his calf. A silent step while John was making tea has put him close enough to block all avenues of escape and he looms over the counter, pinning John against it. He seems almost threatening in his singular focus, but the effect is unfortunately spoiled by an incorrigible twist of dark hair falling out of place on his brow. John thinks with a wild amusement of the nursery rhyme – _There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead._ This close, Sherlock smells of spice and disinfectant and John’s laundry detergent. His eyes, lit and focused, flick over John and it is almost possible to see them recording details – making notes, learning John by heart. _And when she was good, she was very good._ Sherlock shifts closer still, brow furrowing, focused on something just a little lower than John’s nose and above his chin, and John thinks _oh_ very quietly, with no punctuation, a question mark and a shout and breathless whisper.

“I need you,” Sherlock murmurs, pitching his voice low. John swallows, focusing on Sherlock’s eyes, how they seem fever-bright and intense. _But when she was bad she was horrid._  He almost wants to convince himself he didn’t see the tell-tale flicker. That he doesn’t know what it means. That Sherlock is deducing _._ Cataloguing John’s reaction. _Had appealing to John’s baser instincts been effective?_ John feels a low surge of absolute frustration.

“Fine. Show me the damn arm,” he says shortly, to get Sherlock off his back. He turns to the counter to set his tea down and completely misses Sherlock’s face shifting again; for a vulnerable second his face has gone confused and soft and disappointed. John does, however, manage to turn back in time for the grimace that follows it. He stammers out, “W- _What_ \- What’s going on _now_?”

“Nothing,” Sherlock snarls, “ _Nothing_. What it must be like to _function_ with your little mind, I’ve no idea. How do you manage?” The arm goes _splat_ on the tiles, spreading tiny flecks of blood on the cupboards and John’s shoes. Sherlock throws himself away from the kitchen and stalks off over the table, taking the smell of spice and disinfectant with him when he disappears into his bedroom.

“What about your experiment?” John calls towards the door, apologetic, with the disturbing feeling that he’s missed something terribly important.

 _“USELESS!”_ Sherlock’s shout is followed by an accusatory door slam. John stands in the kitchen with his slowly cooling tea and the soft light of the sun getting dimmer and wonders, not for the first time, which one of them is missing the point completely.

\---------------

Of course, that is _before._

After, nothing is the same. John thinks of their relationship like that: _before_ , and _after._ The fall is a full stop, a paragraph ending. A vast abyss that is slowly filled by Mary; by the long years of waiting.

John tries not to think about _before._ He quite intentionally leaves it on the cutting room floor, to be swept away with time. As if it never existed. As if there had never been moments when they came close to that terrible _something_.

Mary guessed, he thinks sometimes. Mary knew.

Mary was always better than John was at knowing what he wanted.

\---------------

The cell door squeals on its hinges in protest as it swings open. John’s first reaction is to scramble backwards, wishing to god there was something he could use as a weapon. Jim, on the other hand, just bounces up from the floor grinning, like he’d been waiting for someone to come.

After two days of the close room John can feel even the slightest draft from the doorway, blissfully cool and fresh on his skin. Another shrouded gunman is waiting on the other side – or maybe the same one, fuck if John can tell – gun up and watchful.

“Knowing about _Sherringford_ is the password, isn’t that funny,” Jim drawls. “Almost like he’s supposed to be a _secret._ ” The UMP gestures him out of the cell. He shoves his hands in his pockets and obeys with a grin. One step into the hallway, he turns and looks back at John. His grin is frozen, insincere, and John for the life of him can’t read a thing in those black-hole eyes.

Unsure if that means he should follow, John stands. The barrel of the gun swings around to him, worryingly steady.

“I’ll just ah – I’ll wait here then,” John says quickly. He raises his hands, making it absolutely clear he poses no threat.

“Now now,” Jim chides, in the direction of the camera. “That’s not very nice. I did make a promise.”

There’s a crackling sound as a radio comes to life in the gunman’s ear. John can see him go thoughtfully still – a subtle trick of posture that John’s used to in soldiers listening to orders. Even if it’s just cabled to your ear, there’s something about being commanded that makes you stand up straight. John tries not to hold his breath in sympathetic response.

Jim is standing directly under the light, now. As it swings back and forth the shadows on his face mutate and stretch, making it difficult to see him as human. John licks his lips. Moriarty, catching the subconscious gesture, bites his lewdly in response – wiggling his eyebrows.

The pause stretches.

The rustle of cloth as the soldier motions John to join Jim isn’t exactly a relief. John steps forward cautiously, careful not to make any sudden movements. One of Jim’s hands snakes out of his pockets and snags John’s. His fingers are cold and his grip is cruelly tight, so the bones of John’s knuckles grind together.

“Don’t be a sissy, Johnny,” Jim hisses, pulling John closer. After unwashed days in the cell, he smells of fever-sweat and his breath is foul and sweet as a corpse. “I thought you _liked_ danger _._ ”

\---------------

They’re shown into a small room that must have once served for interrogations, where rows of unforgiving fluorescent lights leave no room for shadows or humanity. There’s a man sitting at the single bare metal table, and for a moment – fleeting and surreal – John thinks it’s Sherlock.

On second glance, everything about the man is subtly wrong. His nose is just a fraction too narrow, his lips far too thin.  His black hair is shaved down in a soldier’s buzz-cut, little more than a thick close covering like fur. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a leather jacket, tattered and worn. But it’s his eyes that disturb John the most; pale, colourless, and deep-set, they glint under his thin brows like soulless chips of mica.

He’s smiling – a small, and absent-minded thing with no real humor about it. There’s a chair sitting across from him. He gestures to it with a graceful, long-fingered hand, so similar to Sherlock’s that John’s heart freezes and stutters in his chest.

“Jim,” he says. Deep voice. Posh accent.

_Oh Christ._

John finds he can’t take his eyes from a bright keloid scar at the base of the man’s neck.

“Been _longing_ to meet you, Sherringford Holmes,” Jim sings, “I’m told we have business in common.”

Sherringford’s grin spreads. Unlike his brothers, his smile is wide, sincere, and without a trance of sanity.

John tastes bile in his mouth. If you put Moriarty’s smile in Sherlock’s face…

“What business is that?” Sherringford asks. “Ending the world?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim Moriarty has a brand new playmate - brilliant, interesting, and just a little bit sexy. So why does he feel like this is the worst day of his life...?
> 
> Either way. Someone's going to end up bloody and begging, and it's certainly not going to be /Jim./

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About Sherringford's gender - while headcanons are different as to the nature and number of Sherlock's siblings, he has at least one other brother - Mycroft is canonically older than Sherlock, but since he lives and works in town we have to assume someone else inherited the family estate, referred to as being in the country. Sisters wouldn't have been able to inherit - Sherlock has another older brother. (And possibly sisters! But definitely at least one other brother.)

“Ending the world,” Jim tries, rolling it around on his tongue to see how the words feel. “ _Ending the world._ Is that what we’re doing.”

Sherringford Holmes stands. John’s back straightens as instinctive reaction jolts through his muscles. His shoulders draw back. His chin lifts. There’s something about the way Sherringford moves that puts John in mind of a snake sliding between rocks.

John thought he would be taller.

“It doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with it,” Sherringford admits. “At the moment this is more of a _personal_ thing.”

\---------------

“And you don’t care that I was… _fucking_ him.” The words seem bizarre in Sherlock’s posh accent. Sebastian blows blood and snot from his nose onto his hand and wipes it on his pant leg, giving him time to think of a response.

Sherlock’s face twists in disgust. “Don’t,” Sebastian snaps warningly, before Sherlock can say anything. “Don’t be thick, either. _Yeah._ It fucking _kills_ me. But it’s Jim. You think I didn’t know what I was getting into?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I think. I think you had no idea just what James Moriarty was or what he intended for you.” Sherlock sits back on his heels, tilts his head like a curious cat, and studies Sebastian intently. “You realized it rather too late to escape, I’m afraid. I’d bet that you thought he was faithful right until the second you saw my teeth marks in his neck. Well, I would bet, only I don’t tend to _make_ bets. It gets boring you see, knowing I’ll win.”

Whatever expression crosses Sebastian’s face at that, it makes Holmes huff and add reluctantly, “If it’s any consolation, he certainly made sure I was entirely unaware of _you._ He might even have been protecting you, if you can believe it. I’ll admit he had me fooled, even when I – oh. _Oh._ ”

Sherlock’s face goes round in surprise. Sebastian can almost see the connection made in his brain, like electricity arching between two charged points.

“Your _poems,_ ” Sherlock says, and then – his voice taking on an eerily good imitation of Jim – “ _I loved you like the fall of Rome…for the empires crushed to dirt beneath your heels…”_

The internal temperature of Sebastian’s chest drops three hundred and ten degrees, to absolute zero. “What did you just say?”

“ _For the buildings that burnt in my hands when I touched you..._ Oh, that _is_ touching. He quotes you.”

Sebastian flares to his feet, all sympathy and connection with Holmes disappearing under a swell of bitter, guilty hatred. “Not another word – not another _fucking_ word, or I’ll strangle you and _fuck_ Jim’s dramatic ending.”

Sherlock stays where he’s kneeling, staring up at Sebastian. His eyebrows lift, just enough to indicate his disdain for Seb’s outburst before he continues. “Maybe he’s not a sociopath after all. God, I wonder what that’s like.”

Sebastian has until the end of the sentence to debate between reminding Sherlock, _you loved your Doctor,_ and just jumping him. Sebastian being the kind of man he is, it’s not much of a debate.

Sherlock gets through the last syllable, and Sebastian tackles him into the ground. He watches his knuckles distort the skin of Sherlock’s face with almost _unholy_ satisfaction.

_There’s no word for how long I’ve wanted to do this._

\---------------

“Boring,” Jim drawls. “If I’d known this was going to be just another Holmes family feud I wouldn’t have worn my very-best suit.”

“It’s not between me and my brothers,” Sherringford tells him, amused. “Mycroft’s secretary was just the best way to get the ball rolling.”

\---------------

Sebastian manages to get two hits in – good, solid ones, too. He swings right, catches Sherlock’s rebound into the other fist. _Bam. Bam._ The second blow bursts the skin over his knuckles and several blood vessels on Sherlock’s cheekbone. Sherlock grunts.

Sebastian has time to enjoy a visceral feeling of success.

It lasts about thirty milliseconds until Sherlock, with a twisting movement Sebastian’s brain can’t seem to track, grabs his wrist and flips them both over. Sebastian’s shoulder-blades hit the concrete solidly. He feels his face twist into a grimace, and swings with the other fist – knowing even before Sherlock catches it that the roundhouse punch is slow and predictable.

Sherlock slams his wrists to the ground above his head, mixing dirt from the concrete into Sebastian’s split knuckles. Seb hisses. Sherlock straddles him to complete the grip, putting his weight on Sebastian’s hips and wrists equally so Seb can’t buck up. Their faces are bare inches apart. On one side Sherlock’s cheek is mottled red – burst capillaries under the skin making him seem like he’s blushing. On the other, he’s bruising dark like a beauty mark.

“You’re not going to strangle me like _that,_ ” Sherlock chides, his deep gloating voice only slightly ruined by the heaviness of his breath.

“ _Fuck_ you,” Sebastian snarls.

“Yes, an eloquent response as always. _Why_ Jim keeps you around…”

Sebastian spits fury at Sherlock like a cat with its tail being pulled. “The same reason you keep _John Watson._ Don’t think I don’t know. Watched you two through a scope long enough –“ Sherlock’s grip on Sebastian’s wrists goes painful. He makes an inarticulate sound of denial, scraped out of the back of his throat. Seb laughs. “Yeah, I _watched_. And it was fucking pathetic. Watching you _pine_ after your poor, _straight_ Doctor –“

Sherlock lets go of Seb for the exact amount of time it takes him to drive his elbow into Sebastian’s trachea. The soft flesh of Sebastian’s throat collapses inwards, cutting off all oxygen to his brain. His lungs scream for air and he writhes, unable to stop himself, jerking his wrists against Sherlock’s grip.

Somewhere in there Sherlock’s expression has gone cold and deadly. Sebastian arches on the floor – grinding their bodies together as he fights to clear his throat. Sherlock’s judged the blow to a nicety; not enough to collapse Seb’s trachea entirely, but enough so the only air he can gulp down is wheezing tricklets. It’s nowhere near enough. His vision is tinged black around the edges. His heart races out of control. Sherlock’s eyes are narrow and challenging, like Jim when Seb’s fucked up a job, like cold implacable judgement. His grip on Sebastian’s wrists is just as freezing, just as iron-solid. Seb’s head feels light and oddly unattached and – _oh._

The twist of his animalistic struggle for breath pushes him up off the floor, so that only his shoulder blades and hips remain connected, and the press of Sherlock’s weight shouldn’t be _good –_

But it is.

\---------------

Jim checks his finger-nails, pretending to look bored. He’s enough like Sherlock that John can tell, under the act, he’s paying rapt attention.

“Who is it, then? _Please_ tell me you’re secretly angry at Johnny. I’d love a good laugh.”

Sherringford laughs. His laugh is deep and booming, and ends with an incongruous giggle like an ink spatter at the end of a signature.  “Oh. No. Nothing so – you’d say boring? Nothing so boring.”

“Well then – “

“No, wait – ” Sherringford interrupts. John blinks. Hell, even _Jim_ blinks. John gets the feeling that not many people have the balls to interrupt the most dangerous man in London. Even Sherlock had let Jim talk, and that was when Jim had a _gun_ to John’s head. Sherringford nonchalantly holds up two fingers to Jim, and checks his watch. “Sorry. I timed it quite close.”

The tip of his index finger is crooked, like it was badly reattached after an accident.

“Timed what?” Jim asks, careful and pointed like he’s feeling for a landmine.

Sherringford Holmes smiles his crazy-dog smile and points at the wall behind them. “Showtime.”

John turns. Two monitors flank the door – massive and far too modern for the Cold-War era setting, they look like the flat screen TVs John eyes at John Lewis but can never afford. They’re mounted at eye-level on the walls in shiny new water-proof cases.

John really doesn’t want to think about the cost of that.

Which is good, because he’s got a distraction coming. The monitors crackle to life in a loud flare of static. They’re showing a room identical to John and Moriarty’s cell, from two different angles – two cameras. Judging from the view, one hangs in the ceiling and the other is beneath the edge of the cot.

Funny how John’s brain processes that first.

Funny how he even catches the low, furious sound that Jim makes before he realizes what he’s looking at.

Sherlock, straddling Sebastian Moran on the floor of their cell, the skin over his knuckles pale and glowing in the black and white feed. His curls are tangled and dirty, and there’s a bruise over his cheekbone on the side closest the camera. The muscles in his arms stand out as he pushes Sebastian’s wrists into the floor. Sherlock snarls something – Sebastian’s lips part on a response that John reads as a gasp, even without sound. _Helpless._

Sebastian arcs upwards. Underneath the small of his back a gap opens between him and the floor as he curves into Sherlock, a tiny sliver of light. The back of his head leaves the ground. He stretches upwards like a question begging an answer.

Sherlock lunges the rest of the way forward and fits his mouth over Sebastian’s, brutally clear in the monochrome feed.

John’s eyes startle wide open. His jaw goes slack.

He doesn’t catch Jim’s movement until his view of the feed is blocked. John watches Jim smash his fist into and through the TVs protective casing. First the feed showing the close-up explodes into electrical sparks and glass shards, then the other video – cutting short the motion of Sherlock’s back as he lowers himself over Moran.

Jim is terrifyingly silent, even as his knuckles start to leak thick red drops onto the broken casing at his feet. His face is pale with rage; lips pulled in until they’re a thin slash in his face, eyes narrow and glittering.

“Well,” Sherringford tells him brightly, “You can’t say that’s _boring.”_


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Porn and poetry. Sherlock becomes less of a sympathetic character, and poor Sebastian finally gets some. Sort of.

_I loved you like the fall of Rome; for the empires crushed to dirt beneath your heels_

_for the buildings that burnt in my hands when I touched you._

_I loved you like the devil come screaming downwards from heaven_

_trailing angels in his wake._

_You were the end of the world, and I_

_craved you_

_thoughtlessly._

_You were a deep hole in me, a rending of flesh_

_and I was foolish enough to love the wound._

_\---------------_

Sebastian pours all his fury and his frustration upwards, struggling against Holmes’ grip like a badger in a trap. He doesn’t kiss Sherlock; he tries to raze Sherlock’s mouth completely. Biting, snarling, gasping for breath, he fights Holmes until the tendons in his arms are stretched to the breaking point.

And Holmes keeps him down.

Sebastian is an unstoppable force. Sherlock is an immoveable object.

Sebastian’s hips grind up against Sherlock’s rigid weight, the rough texture of fabric between them making things better rather than worse. His heart slams against the back of his rib-cage, driving the breath from his lungs. Anger and desire curl in his stomach like two vast furred beasts, making him feel over-hot and frantic.

 _Fuck,_ he wants.

Sherlock rips his mouth free of Sebastian’s and settles back on his heels as much as he can while still keeping Seb’s wrists pinned to the floor. His pale irises are nearly swallowed in pupil, making them seem larger and darker. His lips are swollen and reddened. His curls hang out of place around his cheekbones like ribbons.

Sebastian shudders. Without consulting his brain his body is rocking up against Sherlock; craving more even as he growls, “Get off me.”

Sherlock raises one eyebrow. For all his flushed cheeks and hooded eyes, his voice is perfectly level and cool. “You don’t want me to.”

“ _Fuck_ y-”

Sherlock lets go of Sebastian’s wrist and backhands him. Hard. Sebastian’s head snaps to the side and his ears start to ring, like the buzzing of hornets, drowning out all other sound. Air hisses inwards over his teeth, cool and crisp as it fills his lungs.

Sebastian might regain the power of thought, then, but before he can Sherlock’s mouth is on his neck. Hot breath gusts just under his ear, then there’s a slightly sticky press of lips – heady contrast to the slick lash of Sherlock’s tongue. Sebastian’s brain goes back offline. Sherlock’s teeth dig in. There’s going to be a bruise over Sebastian’s jugular, matching the one on Jim.

Sebastian snarls; a helpless sound.

Sherlock mouths something, close enough to Sebastian’s neck that he can read Sherlock’s lips by feel.

_John…_

It clicks. Sebastian’s mind comes back online in a flash of cold clarity. He can almost hear Jim’s monotone voice in his ear, **_Well it took you long enough, darling._**

“This is how you pictured it. _Fantasized._ ” At Sebastian’s voice, Holmes stops moving. “You thought you’d just _ignore_ his stupid protests. Take what you both wanted, because he’d never let himself…”

Sebastian can feel in Sherlock’s flinch that he’s got it right.

“What did you just say?”

_\---------------_

Jim turns to Sherringford with ice in his eyes. “I’d warn you off, but the funny thing is you’re dead. You’re already dead.”

“Odd,” Sherringford smiles, “It doesn’t seem to have affected me much.”

“You just haven’t stopped moving,” Jim tells him.

John stares at the space on the ruined monitors that just a moment ago had been Sherlock’s face. He feels oddly detached. Part of him, some remnant of his reptile brain, is screaming. His hands are dead steady. He is aware of a burning feeling low in his gut and an uncomfortable desire to start running – but it’s all curiously far away.

Sherringford Holmes tucks his crooked fingers into the pockets of his leather jacket and strolls over to join Jim. His sneakers crunch the monitor-screen fragments into sand. Jim shudders – quick, like a bird under water, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. It knocks more fluid from his still-oozing knuckles onto the floor. Sherringford smiles down at him, and Jim looks expressionlessly back. There’s only about two inches of difference in their heights, but Jim looks much smaller; so slight that Sherringford looms over him.

Sherringford rubs a hand over his head, adopts a slightly different pose. John recognizes it as a passable impression of Sebastian Moran.

“Sorry, Boss.”

Jim Moriarty _howls._

He throws himself at Sherringford, hands twisted into claws. He gouges for Sherringford’s eyes and Sherringford, laughing, bats him away. John falls back a step in sheer shock. He didn’t think a human voice could _make_ that sound. Jim’s face is caught in a twisted rictus, ugly and bestial. In between warding his blows, Sherringford gestures, waving up behind him.

There must be a camera in the room, because two of the shrouded guards appear like ghosts. They wrestle Jim off Sherringford. It takes both of them some effort. They restrain him until he exhausts himself and sags in their arms. John stays where he is, rooted to the ground.

The thought _I wish I had a gun_ drifts through his mind, but in the next instant he knows it wouldn’t help. He’s not even sure who he’d shoot.

“It was always about _you_ , Jim,” Sherringford murmurs when Jim stops struggling. “Always. You should never have played with Sherlock.” His voice is a mockery of affection, sad and soft and sweet.  Then his face drains of humanity, the sudden and complete shift of a practiced actor. “You should _never have ignored me._ ” He jerks his head in the direction of the door, and the shrouded gun men drag Jim Moriarty away.

Jim raises his head only long enough to spit, “I will _disembowel_ you!” but even to John the threat seems futile.

The door clicks shut.

John is alone with Sherringford Holmes.

_\---------------_

_You promised me nothing, and I believed you_  
 _cut off the first syllable of your name when you licked into my mouth._  
 _My teeth in your lip dragging out your breath, the_  
 _cigarette dangling between your fingers, the_  
 _smoke caressing up the fine bones in your wrist -_  
  
 _that’s when the violent core of me tightened its grip,_  
 _forced your chin up with my thumb and growled._  
  
 _I want to smooth out my harsh edges by grinding them against you_  
 _when you_  
 _take over me I feel myself go smooth and boneless_  
 _moaning out, “you are nothing,”_  
 _- **nothing** -_  
 _"nothing to me."_

_\---------------_

“Is this really working?” Jim says, into Sebastian’s earpiece. “No. I don’t think so. I’m bored. Come here.”

Sebastian is a little surprised by this; understandably, he thinks. He was under the impression that the job he’s on is _important._

Plus Jim hasn’t spoken to him in days. 

It’s just been that sort of month; when Jim isn’t Westwood-and-tie with his hair slicked back, out the door telling Seb not to follow, he’s holed up in the office. God knows what he does all day. Sebastian comes in every night to clean out the ash-tray, and leaves him otherwise alone.

“The target?” he asks, somewhat stupidly.

“ _Leave_ him,” Jim snaps.

Sebastian is halfway to his knees when a foot plants between his shoulders and shoves him back down.

He’s just starting to freak out when he realizes it’s Jim. He lets himself be shoved flat on his stomach, feeling the butt of his rifle dig in to his collar. “Nevermind,” Jim says calmly, “You’ve got a shot. Look at _that_. Focus, now, Sebby…”

It’s hard to focus with James Moriarty grinding the pointed toe of his shoe into your spine, but Sebastian tries his best. He settles back into position and fits the rifle in a more comfortable position against his shoulder. Deep breath in. For once, Sebastian regrets being right-eye dominant. He has to lean into the pressure of Jim’s foot on his spine to see the scope properly as he tries to steady his heartbeat.

Jim knows well enough not to fuck around while Sebastian’s shooting, but Seb wouldn’t put him past it to kick anyways – wait until Sebastian’s finger tightens on the trigger to push him over, so the shot ricochets off the walls and they play Russian Roulette with physics –

_Focus._

_Stop thinking about Jim._

Another deep breath. In the scope, some fat-cat banker pays his whore, and she turns to leave.

“Steady…” Jim tells Seb unnecessarily. “Wait until she goes.”

He’s watching, then, unnaturally sharp eyes tracing what Sebastian needs a scope to see. Sebastian’s finger tightens on the trigger.

_\---------------_

“This is about John. It’s always been about – “

Sherlock’s fist takes Sebastian off guard. He should be expecting it. He isn’t. This time the blow knocks out his vision. For a heart-stopping moment he drifts in the darkness, ears ringing, sight spotted. It’s like dreaming.

“Don’t say his name.”

Sebastian laughs, mouth bloody. “You don’t scare me, Holmes. You’re only being violent because you know it gets me off.”

_\---------------_

In the enclosed space the retort from Sebastian’s rifle is deafening.

Jim giggles. “Lovely.” His toe presses down into Sebastian’s spine. “Now be a good little doggy and roll over.”

Sebastian sets his rifle carefully aside and rolls over onto his back. Jim replaces his foot, heel just under Seb’s breastbone like a Heimlich maneuver. He leans forward, putting weight on it. Sebastian struggles not to choke.

Jim presses harder.

There’s a wild, spinning moment where Sebastian can’t breathe.

“I’ve got to reward you for such a good _job,_ ” Jim muses. “Mmmm. Trousers off.” He steps down and back off, a quick press-and-release like a kiss.

As Sebastian struggles with his trousers, knowing better than to question, Jim strolls over to the window and peeks out. The building Seb was shooting at is an angry hive of activity like an ant-hill that’s been kicked. “You’re going to have to be _quick,_ Tiger,” Jim tells Sebastian over his shoulder, “Or they’re going to catch you with your pants around your ankles.”

Sebastian strips himself near-naked from the waist down, leaving his boots on and settles back where he was on the floor. Jim saunters back over to him, kneels between his spread legs. Sebastian tries to sit up – Jim just raises an eyebrow at him, and he sinks back down. The back of his head thunks against the ground. He takes a deep breath.

Adrenaline sparks and quivers over his skin. The gunshot still seems to reverberate off the walls. They’re going to get caught. There are men with guns already pouring out of the targets’ suite, calculating angles and wind patterns and distance. It’s only a matter of time before someone checks this room.

 _Damn Jim,_ Sebastian thinks, _We can fuck when we get clear of –_

Jim’s lips close around the head of his cock and suck him down to the base.

Leaving is no longer an option.

Sebastian groans as he feels himself get hard _in_ Jim’s mouth – swelling out even as Jim’s tongue traces a spiralling line from his glans downwards. _Oh, fuck –_ “Boss –“

Jim swallows in response, the muscles in his throat working as a tight wave. Sebastian grips the blanket he’d been laying on,hard, and catches a whimper on his teeth. His hips jerk upwards – just a hair, because Sebastian knows damn well that he’s not really allowed to move on the rare occasions Jim choses to do this.

After all, that’s a hell of a lot of unpredictable teeth too close for comfort.

Jim’s mouth moves on Sebastian for what is either an eternity or barely a millisecond – time’s gone a bit funny with that devouring heat cutting off Sebastian’s access to his brain. His chest is heaving by the time Jim sucks his way off again, and the armed men trying to find them suddenly seem a hell of a lot less important.

“Look at you,” Jim purrs. His condescending tone makes Seb burn with humiliation, squeezing his eyes shut and turning his head aside. “Guess it’s true what they say about only having enough blood for one head at a time…”

_\---------------_

 “I’ll say whatever the fuck I want,” Sebastian tells Sherlock. Or tries to, anyways. What comes out is a non-verbal mess of consonants, because Sherlock’s hand has slipped  between them and wrapped around Seb’s cock. He strokes slow, but painfully tight. Rough fabric against Sebastian’s sensitive skin makes him cry out, losing the sound in Sherlock’s shoulder.

He’s got a hand free.

_When did that happen?_

Why is he pulling Sherlock down closer?

_\---------------_

Jim stands up and away from Sebastian with a figure-eight swing of his hips. “Stay where you are,” he commands, in a dull monotone voice.

His suit jacket goes first. The thousand dollar garment drops to the dirt in a clumsy heap, stained and ruined in a second. Jim hums to himself happily as his fingers pick at the fabric of his tie. When he pulls the knot out he wrenches his neck in the opposite direction, and it makes the line of his jaw stand out in violent detail. He snaps his hips around, somehow unconnected from the stillness of his rib-cage and shoulders.

_Who knew Jim could belly-dance?_

Sebastian’s head spins. He feels dizzy. He can’t stop thinking about the way Jim licks his lips.

Jim works his thumbs under the waistband of his trousers, swaying back and forth to some music Sebastian can’t hear. The smell of gunpowder and hot metal is thick on the air. Jim turns around to get his trouser button – winking theatrically over his shoulder, which makes Sebastian laugh even though he’s barely holding himself together.

He wants to dig his fingers into Jim, lift Jim up and pin him to the window sill where they can fuck eight hundred feet up. He wants to bite Jim’s lip until it splits. He wants to paint both their bodies in blood and bruises; so everyone, _everyone_ , will know they belong to each other.

When Jim slides his suit bottoms to the floor, Sebastian can see the flared black-rubber base of the plug currently seated inside him. Stretching him open. Seb groans as that hits his cortex _._ Jim bites his lip and grins – working the toy in and out of himself –  and Sebastian has to grab hard at the floor. He lets his head sink back, closing his eyes. If he keeps watching – well, disobeying Jim isn’t an option. But neither is seeing _that_ and staying still.

Jim giggles.

Sebastian tries hard not to think of Jim fucking himself open in the car, lube thick on his fingers, the leather seats creaking as Jim works the toy inside himself. He tries not to wonder about Jim during the long elevator ride up to Sebastian’s sniper roost – had he stopped in between floors, shoved a hand down the back of his pants? Sebastian can picture him, braced against the elevator’s mirror walls, making himself moan…

There’s a slick, messy sound as Jim pulls the toy free.

“I started without you,” he remarks, and drops it neatly into Sebastian’s bag. It’ll foul up the gear, but at least it won’t leave evidence behind. Sebastian grunts deep in the back of his throat and hopes Jim will take it as an appropriate response. Jim’s still grinning as he straddles Sebastian, running his hands up Seb’s chest over the rough cotton of Seb’s fatigues.

“Don’t you look _delicious._ ”

Sebastian makes another helpless sound, which luckily is all Jim needs for encouragement.

  _\---------------_

 “I can feel just how desperate you are,” Sherlock growls in Sebastian’s ear. His voice is so deep it vibrates Seb’s bones. He punctuates his words with another stroke, and Seb bites off a cry – clutching at Sherlock’s shoulder. “And I’m going to give you exactly what you want. You can pretend afterwards that you didn’t, of course…” Another hard stroke, twisting at the top so the fabric bunches and pulls. Sebastian gasps, hips rolling up into Sherlock’s hand. “But we’ll both know. You were panting for it.”

Sebastian, humiliated, wants to writhe away from the accusation. Deny it. Protest. But there’s no point. His breath comes in ragged pants, and he thrusts up into Sherlock’s hand with reckless abandon, craving release.

_\---------------_

 “Now let’s make this fun, Sebby darling. If you _move_ , you’re fighting your way out of here in nothing but _pants._ Yes?” Jim shoves up the sleeves of his button-down shirt, rucking them up around his elbows. He reaches down behind him, positioning Seb’s cock like it’s a dildo he plans to fuck himself on.

Hell, maybe it is.

“Yes-s –“ Seb manages, which under the circumstances is an achievement.

Jim’s hair falls in thin clouds over his forehead. The top button of his shirt is undone, baring the creamy-white hollow of his throat. He sinks down onto Sebastian slowly, inch-by-inch, with his eyes shut and his mouth just slightly open. There’s a flake of dead skin on his chapped lips and Sebastian thinks there’s nothing in the world worth loving but him.

“Oh god,” Jim gasps, very little more than a breath, “Oh _Seb._ ”

Sebastian would kiss him, but he doesn’t dare move.

_\---------------_

“You need it,” Sherlock continues, mercilessly level and steady. “Shame. Subjugation.” He bites at Sebastian’s ear, twisting his wrist with each pitiless stroke.

It’s all too much. Sebastian breathes in quick, cut-off pants, his control slipping through his fingers like sand.

“How _convenient_ it must have been for Jim, to be able to control you like this,” Sherlock continues. He shoves Seb’s trousers down impatiently. At the first skin on skin contact, Sebastian cries out –

“Fuck!” –

And Sherlock laughs.

“Do you think that’s why he picked you? Because you’re so predictable. So appropriately _simple_ …”

_\---------------_

“So _good_ , Seb, _fuck –_ ” Jim moans like a porn star, fucking himself backwards onto Sebastian. He’s greedy, selfish, chasing his own orgasm with no consideration at all for Sebastian.

It might just be Seb’s favorite way to be fucked. He fixates on the way Jim’s shirt falls open; on how the tip Jim’s tongue curves upwards, pressing against his teeth; on the slick sheen of pre-cum that’s visible as Jim fists himself.

Jim goes rigid as he gets closer – raising up on knees and toes so Seb’s cock angles straight for his prostate every time he slams himself backwards.

Pressure builds in Sebastian’s stomach, hot and thick and demanding. He’s having trouble remembering why he’s not moving, why he’s not _grabbing_ Jim and _forcing_ him over the edge. Jim is so close, after all, and if Sebastian dug his fingernails in Jim’s hips and slammed up into him hard he knows Jim would come sloppily undone…

There must be a reason why he’s not moving – Did Jim tell him not to?

_Aw, fuck it._

Sebastian grabs Jim by the waist, plants his feet on the floor, and thrusts upwards so hard that Jim cries out. His eyes squeeze shut. Seb does it again, just as hard, and Jim’s mouth falls into a stunned, perfectly round “O.” He comes almost silently, only a tiny vulnerable gasp to mark the moment he loses himself.

Seb feels that gasp slice the last remaining thread connecting him to reality, and goes tumbling over the edge after him.

_\---------------_

It is, for the record, worth fighting his way out of the building in pants for.

_\---------------_

Sebastian feels his climax build like a freight train barrelling towards him. He tries to stop, to slow down.

Sherlock smiles, smug, watching him with pale eyes that miss nothing.

Sebastian doesn’t stand a chance in hell.

_\---------------_

Sherringford turns to John. “Be a dear, and go rattle Sherlock’s cage for me. Down the hall, to the left. I don’t want things to go off prematurely, if you know what I mean.” He smiles, manic, with too many teeth. John swallows. He licks his lips, but they’re still too dry to speak afterwards.

Sherringford doesn’t wait for a response. He disappears out the door to the right, shoes crunching over the monitor glass. John takes his first real breath since he’d seen Sherlock on Sebastian.

Without stopping to think, he hurls himself out the door to the left. Only one thing matters now.

_Sherlock._


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the other side of Reichenbach is examined: Sherlock gets called on his crap (a little), Sherringford is creepy (a medium amount) and there are feels (a lot).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to http://andwooscott.tumblr.com/ for reccing Separation on tumblr the other day ayyyyy gurl yeah I saw that

“Boss,” says the crackling voice on the intercom. “ _Boss.”_

Jim Moriarty turns over on the cold, hard cot and puts his back to the room. “Don’t call me that.”

His voice is flat and dead, but his eyes are open and he’s thinking fast. If there’s one thing Jim knows about playing games, it’s that you don’t give _up_ when you’re losing.

You give hell to anyone dumb enough to beat you.

\---------------

“ _Sherlock!”_ John wrenches the door to Sherlock’s cell open. The hinges, half rusted, are sticky and difficult. John has to put his shoulder to the door, throwing his weight into it, to get any sort of reasonable movement going. By the time John’s standing in the doorway, Sherlock is already on his feet and turning.

He’s smiling, the special sort of smile he reserves for John being clever. John doesn’t know quite how he feels about that. Sherlock’s obviously had a rough time of it; he’s the sort of dirty he rarely allows himself to get, even at his most distracted. His curls are out of place and greasy. His clothes are dishevelled.

John’s gaze slides down Sherlock to the floor.

Sebastian Moran hasn’t stood for John’s entry. He curls from his back onto his side like he’s been injured, tucking his knees defensively up into his chest. He’s clutching at himself and shuddering, the bright shock of his blonde hair trembling over his hunched shoulders.

The doctor in John aches.

There’s something sick about the way Sherlock is still lightly smiling. John stares between him and Sebastian Moran, unable to think of anything to say.

Sherlock’s smile falters. “John ...”

Something tightens in John’s throat. “Jesus Christ...” he says, “ _Sherlock_. What have you done?”

John shouldn’t feel bad. After all, this is Sebastian Moran: Moriarty’s right-hand-man. This is a killer. This is a blood-thirsty brute with a scarred face and hands made for murder…

John thinks of the way Moriarty had held his wrist and said, _you’re not in the war, you’re here,_ like he knew exactly what helped with post-traumatic nightmares. How he had _howled_ when Sherringford mimicked Sebastian.

On the floor, Sebastian Moran is a murderer. But he’s also a soldier, and he’s broken.

John knows exactly what that’s like.

 _“_ It’s all right. It’s okay now,” Sherlock says reassuringly, reaching out to John.

“No, it’s – _you’ve bloody assaulted him!”_ John jerks back from Sherlock’s outstretched fingers.

Sherlock winces. _“_ Let’s not jump to conclusions – ”

“What, you’ve got an explanation for yourself? Jesus fucking _Christ_ , Sherlock – This is more than a _bit_ not good – ”

“Oh, don’t be so _dull_ ,” Sherlock interrupts. On the floor, Sebastian Moran takes a deep, wracking breath. “It’s not about him. It was just a ruse, John. Credit me with _some_ grasp of the situation. It should now be obvious even to _you_ that Sebastian is the most effective leverage anyone has when it comes to Jim?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I thought as much. Once I’d deduced from the multiple cameras that there was, in fact, an _intended audience_ for anything that might occur in this cell, the best option was to play along. Whoever imprisoned us clearly intended to use the footage for something, and that gave me some idea of the part I was meant to play. Sex or torture? Well, it was simply a matter of manipulating Sebastian’s natural masochistic response –“

John says “ _Sherlock –_ “ at the same time as Sebastian says,

 _“Bullshit._ ”

Sherlock turns to study Sebastian. “Sorry?”

“I said, _no._ Don’t try to pass this off like you weren’t hungry.”

“Excuse me, I think I’m in a position to know –“

“You can lie to yourself all you want, but don’t try to weasel your way out of it.” Sebastian shoves himself up from the floor. His lip is split and bleeding. His face is a dark mess of bruises, starting to swell. “You wanted _._ Just as much as I did _._ ”

He glares at Sherlock and in his face, self-loathing and defiant, John is surprised to recognize a twisted sort of courage.

Sebastian, as much as he might hate himself for it, doesn’t flinch from what he knows is true.

\---------------

The gunshot at St. Bart’s goes through two brains. Jim Moriarty tumbles backwards in a spray of blood, the brilliant gleam in his eyes extinguished forever; and Sebastian Moran – watching through the distance of a rifle scope – feels all rational thought fragment like mirror-shards.

It takes him a long time to piece himself back into something even vaguely human. The first few days, he remembers nothing. His route back to the Conduit Street house is a mystery; his escape from the police, a blank. His first conscious memory is almost a week later, in the bed they shared. There’s an empty bottle of cheap vodka on the bedside table, a glass on the floor tacky with evaporated dregs.

Sebastian is unshaven and sweat-sticky. The curtains are drawn, casting the room in a sickly yellow hue. It smells stale, musty, and the bed sheets tangled around his torso are unpleasantly damp with sweat. His mouth tastes like something has crawled into it and died.

He stumbles to the bathroom. In the mirror, his eyes are bloodshot and sagging. He looks ten years older than he had a month ago.

He stares at himself. The face in the mirror stares back, offering no comfort.

 _Jim’s dead,_ he thinks, but the words are a blank static, as if his mind is refusing to hear them.

\---------------

The head of Jim’s network in London disappears, and he’s only the first of many. The empire is whittled down slowly, man by man. Sebastian isn’t stupid. He knows someone is hunting them. He just doesn’t care.

When he gives it thought – which isn’t often – he thinks it might be Mycroft Holmes. But it doesn’t seem to matter.

At first, Sebastian keeps up appearances; he lives in the Conduit street house and on the rare occasions he goes out in public, he shaves and dresses in the suits Jim picked out for him. But it’s not really worth it. Everyone knows what happened. The smart members of the network are those who go to ground immediately. The stupid are quickly picked off by whatever’s destroying Jim’s legacy. Sebastian finishes the jobs Jim had lined up before… _before._

Then he takes a few contracts from other people, just to stay busy. Easy shots. He knows he’s slipping.

He stops shaving.

He stops dressing in Jim’s suits.

When he goes out in public, he’s rarely sober.

He starts frequenting the kind of bars that Jim would turn his nose up at. He starts fights with big, overweight men, the kind that layer muscle and fat until they move like heavy behemoths. None of them can touch him.

When he’s put enough of them in the hospital, the bikers stop fighting him. He stops going out at all.

Sebastian lives in the bed at Conduit house and at the bottom of a bottle, and if he’s not half the man he was he’s still twice as good as anyone who wants to kill him.

\---------------

The head of Jim’s Eastern European branch is dead.

That’s worryingly high up in the organization. Sebastian would be scared now; if there was anything left that scared him.

On the anniversary of the day Jim died, Sebastian doesn’t get out of bed. Not because it’s the anniversary, mind.

He just hasn’t gotten out of bed in a while.

\---------------

“When you’re losing, Tiger,” Jim says, propped up on his elbows with a pair of binoculars glued to his eyes, “That’s when you start playing _dirty_.”

\---------------

Sebastian finds the tape on his doorstep two years, seven months, and twenty-four days after Jim dies. It’s addressed to him in Jim’s scratchy, erratic hand. He stares at it blankly without the reality of its existence really registering. It’s only when he realizes that standing around with the door open arse-naked isn’t something normal people _do_ that he bends and mechanically picks it up _._

He shuts the front door behind him and turns the tape over and over in his hands. It’s a plain black VHS; his name written in black ball-point on a white sticky label on one side. The letters are indented. If someone’s forging Jim’s handwriting, they know him well enough to know that he digs his pen in on the end of each letter like he’s forcing them out.

Sebastian isn’t even sure if they _own_ a VHS player.

He finds one in the basement, under a thin film of dust, and carries it upstairs. Takes him a good five minutes to figure out how to plug it in to the high-tech flat-screen TV, but he manages to do that, too.

He turns the TV on to static and lets it play. The white noise fills the room, little black and white ants crawling over the screen in the absence of signal. Sebastian swallows.

 _No use hiding,_ he thinks. And presses play.

\---------------

“ _Did you miss me?”_ Jim turns to face the camera.

Sebastian sits heavily on the couch.

“ _Fuck_ me,” he comments, to no one in particular. A part of him still feels like static is playing; nothing but noise, with no signal to speak of.

_This can’t be happening._

But it is. “That part’s for the rest of the world, Tiger,” Jim continues, shrugging his shoulders to his ears. Sebastian can barely hear him over the rush of white sound. “I _know_ you missed me. I bet you’re awfully mad.” He skews up his mouth, either apologetic or mocking – Sebastian can’t seem to tell which. “That’s why I’m sending this from a safe distance. And, well… I did _mean_ to come back sooner. Promise I did.”

Jim shuts his eyes, then, and stops talking. Now _that’s_ regret, honest and painful. Sebastian sort of misses the mocking; seeing pain on Jim’s face has never been something he’s comfortable with. The TV hums into the silence. Sebastian realizes he’s gripping his kneecaps hard enough that the bones are starting to ache, and consciously relaxes his hands.

“I wanted to come home,” Jim says, a little quieter. “I do hate when other people play with my toys. And those bars you’ve been going to…” He cracks his neck to the side. “Mm-mm, _naughty_ of you. But while Sherlock’s distracting himself hunting down the strands of the spider-web – “

“Sherlock’s _alive?!”_ Sebastian demands of the screen, even though he’s not quite stupid enough to think Jim will answer. “What the hell was it all bloody _for_ , then?!”

“ – ter me. I don’t precisely know _who,_ _but,_ I didn’t want them getting their sticky fingers on _you._ ”

Sebastian gets the feeling that bit was important, but there’ll be time to rewind the tape later. Now, Jim is staring at him from the screen, face carefully blank. He’s only visible from the chest up, but Sebastian can see from movement in his shoulders that he’s nervously shifting his weight – one foot to the other, a short restless fidget.

This is Jim at his most vulnerable. Sebastian’s surprised the recording survived.

“I’m waiting,” Jim says, blunt and what passes for heart-felt between them, “At the Tower of London. Jimmy-the-tourist, today. I won’t blame you if you don’t come find me, Tiger. If you’re too angry to want to stick around. I mean, I’ll still have your heart in a box for leaving me. But I’ll understand.”

Hint of a smile, just a hint, and the video cuts.

It’s replaced by a little animated image – Jim, jaw jittering up and down like a ventriloquist’s dummy. _Did you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?_

\---------------

On the top right monitor, footage from cell one plays. John’s face contorts in anger. Sherlock raises his hands defensively. Sebastian starts to stand.

The top left monitor, in contrast, might as well be displaying a still image.

The bones of Jim’s back press against his no longer crisp dress shirt. Sherringford reaches out and traces Jim’s pixelated spine with his crooked, badly-repaired finger. Static from the screen makes the fine white hair on his knuckles stand on end. “Boss,” he says again softly, even though the red light for the intercom’s not on. “Oh, _Jim_. What I’m going to do to _you._ ”

\---------------

Rewind. Play.

“…while Sherlock’s distracting himself hunting down the strands of the spider-web, somebody else is in on the joke, and has been after _me_. I don’t precisely know _who,_ _but,_ I didn’t want them getting their sticky fingers on _you._ ”

Rewind. Play.

“I wanted to come home.”

Rewind. Play.

“I wanted to come home.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sherringford Holmes is even more of a dick than you thought he was.

“Hey, Sherlock. Bet you can’t convince Mummy to unground me.”

“Why would I want to?”

“Bet you five quid.”

“You don’t have five quid.”

“I do so.” Sherringford sits on his haunches in his bedroom door and stares at Sherlock in the living room. His half-squatting position and over-size black windbreaker make him seem smaller than he is. “And I could have more. I could have anything.” Sherlock twists in his favorite squishy purple armchair to face Sherringford. There’s a smudge of dirt on Sherringford’s nose and the palms of his hands are scraped. He looks half-wild; the thick messy fringe of his hair covering his eyes. Sherlock, marking his page in his book with a finger, can’t seem to read his expression.

The first time that’s happened. With anyone.

“Don’t be stupid, you can’t have _anything,_ ” Sherlock tells Sherringford scornfully to cover his unease, and goes back to his book.

Page 28. _Because he, having a lofty spirit and far-reaching aims, could not have regulated his conduct by anything but the shortness of life –_

“You could too,” Sherringford says loudly, breaking Sherlock’s concentration. “Don’t you remember how dumb they all are? You and me and Mike. We can do whatever we like and no one’s ever gonna be good enough to catch us.”

Sherlock puts Machiavelli’s _The Prince_ down on an end table and gives Sherringford his full attention.

“What,” he asks slowly, “Are you talking about?”

Sherringford smiles humourlessly. He is eight years old and for the first time, Sherlock feels a cold shiver of fear.

\---------------

The intercom crackles to life again. “Well Jim,” Sherringford starts, sounding appallingly pleased with himself even beneath the static, “I’m bored. Since you couldn’t handle the monitors, I was thinking – maybe you’d prefer a play-by-play?”

Jim grits his teeth. The only reason he doesn’t jam his fingers in his ears immediately is because he refuses to give Sherringford the satisfaction of a response.

“I’m watching the two of them now and I must say,” Sherringford continues blithely. “He’s really quite fit, isn’t he? Your boy. I’m impressed. Too bad Sherly got there first.”

Jim’s going to grind his teeth into bone dust, at this rate.

With an effort, he keeps his shoulders relaxed. After all, Sherringford is watching; and if tension’s going to show, it’ll be there. Jim imagines Sherringford’s nose pressed to the surveillance feed as he gluttonously devours Jim’s weakness. The thought makes Jim angry in a way that’s almost physically painful; a fire’s been lit in his back-brain, and _all_ he can think about – all that _exists_ – is the murder of Sherringford Holmes.

“Sherlock’s got Sebastian’s shirt off now. _Euch._ Shame about the scars…”

There’s one on Sebastian’s ribs from a job gone bad that curves like the tail of a comet. Jim traces it with his fingers while Sebastian sleeps, and it never fails to make Sebastian scowl without waking; scrunching up his nose, but never so much as rolling away from Jim’s touch.

Jim stares blankly forward at the wall.

_Impalement._

_No, too quick. I’ll dissolve him in acid…_

_Maybe I should let Sebastian cut out his tongue?_

“Should I tell you what he’s begging for?”

Jim wants his hands wrapped around Sherringford’s entrails with a ferocity that precludes all other thought.

“Say something, Jim. I’m beginning to think you’re not listening. Beginning to think you’re _ignoring_ me again.” _If I could –_ “Oh… and my, my. Our Sebastian _is_ a big boy, isn’t he?”

Jim hears something in his mouth _crack._

_Lucky I have excellent dental._

\---------------

Sherlock never does find out what happened to Redbeard. Why the dog got so sick, so suddenly.

Earlier that week, Sherlock had refused to help Sherringford ‘teach a lesson’ to the boys having a go at him. Sherringford had been furious, but Sherlock went to the park after school instead – threw tennis balls until Redbeard was too exhausted to chase them, and ruined his second-best pair of trousers.

On Sunday Sherringford taught himself to dance coins between his fingers. Mummy insisted they all take Redbeard to the vet together. In the back seat of the van, light glinted off a shiny quid playing back-and-forth over Sherringford’s knuckles.

Mycroft watched him narrow-eyed and knowing. In the vet’s reception room he stole the coin and spoke to Sherringford in a hissing whisper. Sherlock buried his fingers in the soft russet curls of Redbeard’s ruff and tried not to listen.

The dog had been whimpering, soft and constant.

\---------------

“What do you think bothers you more, Jim? Sherlock with his hands on Sebastian? Or knowing that you’re going to find Sherlock’s _marks_ on Sebastian later?”

_If only there was even a **little** distraction. Even a **teensy** one. _

But Jim’s been over every inch of this cell with his eyes twenty times, and the square foot of wall in front of him isn’t exactly riveting.

Sherringford doesn’t seem to notice Jim’s effort to stay still. The hidden intercom, wherever it is, keeps up a merciless stream of gloating sound.

“He does like to _bite,_ my brother… Well, Seb should be able to empathize, at least. He used to see Sherlock’s tracks on _you,_ didn’t he?”

That seeps into Jim’s guts like a tablespoon full of vinegar.

He scowls and tries to amuse himself picturing Sherringford in an Iron Maiden. It’s not particularly helpful. Not even planning the patterns of impalement on Sherringford’s skin can take away the tide of words coiling around his eardrums.

“Oh _God._ Really, Jim, what were you _thinking_? Fooling about with Sherlock, for God’s Sake. The _Virgin._ ”

Jim rolls his eyes. _Blame it on bad luck and a dash of obsession._

_Mummy always said I’d do bad for myself._

Comic retorts aren’t cutting his hearing off either, more’s the pity. “It should have been me, Jim,” the voice on the speakers tells him. Jim scrapes at his own upper arms with his fingernails where the camera can’t see, trying to focus himself on the pain. “ _Business in common…_ Is that what you thought we had? Business. We had _everything_ in common.” Sherringford’s getting louder, each word cracking like a whip into the silence. In front of Jim, on the wall, a small piece of mold has come loose and sways with each soft intake of breath. Jim watches it studiously. Anything, _anything_ , so not to hear…

_I’m going to skin every inch of you that Sherlock’s touched, Sebby, I really am._

_And gee, isn’t **that** going to be painful._

“Why so silent?” Sherringford demands finally. The light in the cell flickers, trying to prompt Jim into action. Jim refuses to be prompted. “Is it because I’m right? Or is it that I’m _wrong._ Maybe you’re really just angry they’d rather have each other than deign to touch _you…”_

Jim’s mouth tastes like charcoal. At this rate, his teeth will abrade away entirely and when Sebastian kisses him, there will be nothing hard or painful about it.

Jim’s not entirely sure how he feels about that.

“Oh – there we are. Sherlock’s sucking him off, now. You should hear the whimpers…”

\---------------

There’s a moment of solidarity when Sebastian almost thinks Doctor Watson is going to take his side, and then John frowns. “Although – just to be clear here – why would he want _you?_ ”

If Seb was just a bit more insecure, he’d be insulted. What, like it’s hard to picture anyone would want to get off with him?

He wedges himself in a sitting position against the bed and stares John down. The doctor falters, having to glance away. Shadows on his face pick out his wrinkles, making him look older than he is.

Sherlock scoffs. “I _wouldn’t_ ,” he insists. “You don’t honestly believe a man like him could –”

“He’s fucked Jim, too,” Sebastian interrupts loudly. John and Sherlock go simultaneously pale, like their bodies have synchronized. Sebastian can nearly see Sherlock’s pale eyes _shudder_ as they flick back and forth for a way out. John goes still and tense, soldier’s posture, his fingernails curling inwards to dig into his palms. Sebastian sympathizes. But he also sees the weak spot in Sherlock like a glowing light, and if there was ever a chance for revenge – “Thinking he’s untouchable – that illusion’s your fault. Not mine. You put him on a fucking pedestal and he’s only human, so of course you’re surprised when he thinks with his cock.”

John opens his mouth and shuts it again. It makes him look unfortunately like a koi fish.

“Leave John alone,” Sherlock says, in a furious monotone.

“What, scared I’m going to hurt your girlfriend’s feelings?”

That gives John an easy response – “I’mnot _gay_ ,” he says, as if it’s half-automatic to protest.

He looks so determined about it that Sebastian has to laugh. “Oh, yeah. You’re not. Poor Sherlock.”

“ _Moran_ –“ Sherlock starts, warningly. He shifts his balance like he intends to start forward again and Sebastian’s bruised face twinges in anticipation.

_Not like threats have ever been very good at getting through to me, though._

“Don’t _Moran_ me. Weren’t you desperate to hump my leg because he’s so fucking brutally in denial?” Sebastian pictures Jim, grinning in approval. _What would you say, Boss? What’s the kill shot?_ “How much did I remind you of your good doctor, Sherlock? And how much did I remind you of _Jim?_ ”

This time Sherlock can’t help himself. He gets two steps closer to having another round with Sebastian before John can haul him back. Sebastian doesn’t move from his place, mainly because moving is _painful._ The hard floor may be making his ass go numb, but his body feels like he just crawled out of the drainpipe. His will to move is collapsed in the gutter, aching and frustrated, cold in the wake of desire just like the rest of him.

“Close your mouth before you lower the collective IQ of the nation,” Sherlock snaps impotently, John’s hand on his arm holding him back.

 _Might as well be hanged for the sheep as the lamb._ “You two are fucking pathetic,” Sebastian continues, loud and challenging. He folds his arms across his chest and refuses to be the first to back down. “You keep dancing around, refusing to admit what you both want. Which is fine, since you’re both spineless fucking cowards –”

“I don’t _want_ – ”

“ – but when I get _raped_ for it, I think I’m fucking entitled to have my say.”

John looks horrified. There’s a short silence, then he says, “…You’re mistaken,” quiet and contrite.

“Don’t fucking deny it. I _know_ you.” _Poor little army man with the genius that doesn’t really see him._ “I _am_ you.”

\---------------

“You’re so sure he’s loyal to you. No one’s loyal to men like us, Jim. They’re just afraid.”

\---------------

Sherringford, his teachers say, is a lonely child. His grades are appalling; if only he’d apply himself more, they’re sure he could do well. But then, that’s true of all the Holmes boys.

He’s not like other troubled kids. The police never pay a visit to the Holmes house; there’re never any loud rows between Sherringford and his parents; he’s never even suspended from school. But Sherlock stays up late and when he listens, he can hear the tread of Sherringford’s sneakers on the window sill. Gradually, slowly, the neighbourhood pets start to disappear. People talk about foxes. Maybe a badger.

Cole Sprout’s gaudy new watch – a gift from his rich aunt, at Christmas – appears in the pawn shop.

His dog returns home.

Sherringford smiles, and the now-worn quid dances over his knuckles.

\---------------

“He’s got his hand in Sherlock’s hair. Bit of a tight grip, has he? Wonder if that’s why you kept your hair short. But no… No. You would have loved it, wouldn’t you? The violence of it. That’s all he had to give you.”

_That day, on the desk, when he took me apart and my whole mind was quiet._

_He was the opposite of violence. He was a stable place when the whole world keeled over._

But still the thought of clever, cruel Sebastian, who always knew perfectly how to escalate things, working his fingers through Sherlock’s curls – it’s unbearable. Jim digs his fingers a little harder into his bicep. But Sherringford’s monologue screws through his brain like a twelve volt drill, and Jim can’t stop picturing Sebastian –

“- Jamming his cock down Sherlock’s throat. Oh my. That _can’t_ be pleasant… My poor _brother_. Sebastian really doesn’t care at _all,_ does he? What a Neanderthal you’ve chosen, Jim.”

Jim’s heart aches.

_So Sherringford bought in to that, did he? Not as smart as he thinks he is!_

Jim’s head is a wild mess of Sebastian: Sebastian writing his burning poems, calculating trajectories on diner napkins, scowling when Jim catches him using words like “dialectic” in every-day conversation. Sebastian reading Dostoevsky with a rifle balanced on his knee. Talking about the muscle structure of tigers. Telling Jim off for preferring Cliff Notes to novels.

_My **Neanderthal.**_

“Maybe that’s what you like about him. Bestial strength. I mean, judging from his performance here, he certainly fucks like an animal. He must fuck you like you don’t matter at all.”

Jim freezes. _Say that again._

_‘He must fuck you like you don’t matter at all’ – are we talking about the same Tiger?_

Because even when it’s rough Sebastian _fucks_ like Jim is the heart of the universe.

Even when they get lost on the border between fornication and homicide, Sebastian fixates on Jim’s pain to the point of obsession. He breaks Jim down with studied attention to weakness. He throws punches craving Jim’s intake of breath as much as the bruises. When he loses control, he rips at Jim tooth and nail because even when he _hates_ Jim, he _fucks_ like _nothing_ else matters.

There’s a buzzing in Jim’s ears so loud it drowns Sherringford out entirely. Certainty explodes in a warm rush through him, pouring into his head until he feels almost dizzy. _Whatever he’s describing, he’s **not** watching Sebastian._

Jim remembers exactly what it’s like to be touched by Sebastian.

Jim will _always_ remember.

Sebastian might be getting off with Sherlock Holmes, but if he is, he’s not doing it coldly. Oh, Sebastian might hurt Sherlock and that might spill over the border into an orgasm, but it won’t happen because Sherlock doesn’t _matter._

Jim starts to smile. It’s a vicious and ugly expression, inches from the wall where the cameras can’t see.

_You’re lying to me. I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re lying._

_And I **will** find out the truth, _ Jim thinks, silent and fierce. _I will find out the truth and then I’ll make you into a lampshade for crossing me._

As hopes go, the thought is thin. But it’s a start. After all, Sherringford and Jim have a lot in common.

Jim’s already anticipating the moment Sherringford gets bored of nothing but stillness and comes down to provoke a response in person.

\---------------

When Carl Powers dies, Sherlock half-believes he should tell the police about Sherringford. He’s not entirely convinced Sherringford _didn’t_ do it until Moriarty gives him the shoes twenty years later.

\---------------

“I know exactly what it’s like to pine. I know you still have nightmares. I know you still crave the war, too.”

\---------------

When Sherlock is eleven Sherringford disappears. It’s a warm night at the end of June – the start of a promising summer, already hot and muggy. Sherringford’s just graduated. Looking back, Sherlock wonders why he even bothered to finish school; but he did, and on the mantle there’s a photo where Sherringford’s bony shoulders drown in his graduation gown.

Sometime in the next year, Sherlock’s parents will put that photo away forever. Sherlock doesn’t know exactly when; for him, that summer is the start of a hazy period that drifts in and out of his memory, never staying long.

It begins (or maybe it ends) on a warm night at the end of June.

Just after eleven pm Sherringford appears in Sherlock’s doorway with a small paper packet and the kind of smile that never means anything good for Sherlock. “Hey,” he says, “I’ve got something for you.”

“Bugger off,” Sherlock tells him, rolling over in bed and tugging the blankets over his head.

Sherringford laughs. “Leave it here, then.” He enters Sherlock’s room without knocking – the only person brave enough to do that on a regular basis – and there’s a rustling noise as he puts the pocket down on the dresser. From the squeak of his soles on the hardwood, Sherlock can tell Sherringford’s dressed to go out. He clutches the blankets higher around his ears, hoping Sherringford will leave him alone.

But Sherringford hesitates by the bedside. “I’m leaving now,” he says, after a moment. “And I don’t think I’ll ever be back. There’s so much, I – Sherlock. This place – it’s too small for us, man. There’s a whole world out there.”

 _So what,_ Sherlock thinks, _What’s the point of a whole world if it’s all basically rubbish?_

After a moment, Sherringford laughs into the silence, soft and a little bit mad. “I’ll see you on the other side, I guess,” he tells Sherlock. “Left you a present. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

The sound of shoes on the hard floor. The door creaks shut. Sherlock squeezes his eyes tight and thanks god Sherringford hadn’t been worse.

He dreams of nebulous, terrible things, which lose shape by morning.

Sherlock will find the small packet of cocaine on the dresser almost as soon as he wakes up. It is the first of many summers he will never really remember.

\---------------

He wonders, later, how long Sherringford spent calculating the dose. Had he taken his time deciding which drug was most likely to addict? Or had it been a lucky guess?

Had he planned it in advance?

Had he always intended this for Sherlock?

Maybe it had just been a mad whim. Sherlock could never predict Sherringford, not really. There’s a night in a drug-den in Glasgow, an unseasonably cool night in the first days of August, when Sherlock thinks about finding him. Asking him _why_. But it’s too much effort, and the drugs have been good, and money’s been coming steadily in – Sherlock just tries not to think about how.

That night he takes too much, and it’s a bad one. He twitches on his second-hand stained mattress, breathing in cigarette smoke and gasoline. His hands tremble. His feet kick at nothing.

And Sherringford, watching him, laughs.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim doesn't have weaknesses. Of course he doesn't. Weaknesses are for the stupid, the slow, the ordinary. 
> 
> But if he /did/ have weaknesses - just /if/ - Sebastian would be the one to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Drug use/non-consensual drug use.
> 
> Okay so you gotta tell me what you think of the twist. Good luck, buddy.

Sherringford gets bored and peters off, after a while. It’s not long. Two hours. An eternity.

Jim can wait him out. Jim can be _patient,_ when he needs to be.

At some point the light fizzles out and plunges the room into darkness. Jim assumes that means the day is over, but there’s no telling if the cameras have night vision so he doesn’t shift from his place on the bed. His hip is starting to hurt from lying on his side too long. The flattened, numbed flesh aches all the way down to his knee like a bruise. Trying to take some weight off by adjusting his position, Jim slides a hand under his head to cushion it. The greasy texture of his hair makes him grimace. He feels stale and grimy all over, covered in a film of dirt and insomnia.

In the dark his eyes play tricks, generating swirling patterns of colour and light when his brain gets bored of monotony. He breathes gently through his mouth, lips parted, eyes shut. He could be sleeping, to a casual observer.

He’s not, of course.

Sebastian says Jim never really sleeps, but then Seb has such a _limited_ perspective on things. He doesn’t understand there’s an art to never letting your brain go off; riding the crest of insanity like an unbreaking wave, always on top because the fall would kill you.

It’s not that Jim doesn’t _sleep._ Everyone sleeps. Jim just never shuts down (Except, of course, on the rare occasion he _does_ ).

\---------------

They’re on a job in Florence and Jim hasn’t gone to bed in – well, God knows how long. Sebastian keeps shooting Jim glances out of the corner of his eye, like he expects Jim to suddenly keel over unconscious. It’s not going to happen. Jim’s got a death-grip on control; he feels in rhythm from his slicked-back hair to his dark shined shoes. His interminably black suit is crisp and measured perfectly to intimidate, down to the gleaming diamond cufflinks.

Dressed like this, Jim owns the world, and when you own the world, you don’t do ordinary things like _sleep._

Sebastian, reflected in the mirrored door of a high-rise bank, mutters, “Are you sure you’re up to this?” to the back of Jim’s head. He’s tapping his fingers restlessly against his ribs, where the cut of his suit conceals a gun.

Jim jerks his head frustratedly to the side, not quite a nod. More _fuck off, Tiger._ He smoothes his hands down the front of his suit, double-checking to make sure it’s flawless before he reaches for the burnished steel door handle. Sebastian doesn’t ask twice, which is lucky, because Jim doesn’t really want his bodyguard bleeding when they go in.

It makes for such a tacky first impression.

The bank has creamy marble floors and Jim relishes the picture he and Sebastian must make, sweeping over them towards the elevator like shadows.

_Storm crows. Harbingers of death._

Sebastian leans over his shoulder to hit the up arrow, and Jim shoves his hands in his trouser pockets. _Ave Maria_ is playing over the bank’s speakers, insidious notes creeping around them as they wait.

There are bags under Jim’s eyes and he knows it. He’s going to have Sebastian kill anyone stupid enough to think insomnia makes him slow. In fact, he’s looking forward to it.

If he had weak spots Tiger would cover them, darling boy.

\---------------

Jim isn’t exactly sure how long it is after the lights go out that he realizes something is wrong. The change almost sneaks up on him, it’s so gradual. A sort of thickening in the air, minute by minute, until the room feels humid and close. The temperature doesn’t change, but Jim’s warmer. His skin is flushed, except where it’s gone deadly pale on the tips of his fingers.

Jim frowns to himself, the pull of his facial muscles feeling inappropriately intense. The swirling patterns and colours of visual inactivity have become almost palpable things, wheeling around him in the dark as paisley print and Catherine wheels.

_Now what exactly is going on **here**?_

He can’t make much out in the dark but it seems to him like his fingernails end in spider-web strings, reaching out and up to the door and the cameras. Something has gone dreadfully wrong in his visual cortex. Or –

Jim rolls over onto his back. The motion makes the blood in his head slosh and run, until he thinks he’s going to leak out his own ears. He has to take a sharp, sudden breath to steady himself. The rush of air into his lungs makes him dizzy.

Jim realizes he’s clutching at the bed with one hand and his hair with the other. He takes another breath, deeper but slower. The room tilts like a midway ride. All of a sudden, it has far too many corners.

_And if black is a texture and silence is a taste, I –_

Jim isn’t stupid, but the truth takes a moment to fight to the front of his mind. He tries it out loud, rolling the possibility over his tongue even as he realizes what’s happened.

“Drugs in the air-vents,” he murmurs, to an empty room.

Sherringford giggles, piercing and clear, the notes of his voice like icicles pricking Jim’s temples.

\---------------

Sebastian is scowling in the elevator.

“Are you _sure –_ ”

“I’m _fine._ Please be quiet before I do something creatively nasty to you for nagging.”

The elevator has a symmetry that the outside of the building had lacked. Jim finds that comforting. On the street, the bank had been almost _offensively_ out of place; tastelessly cold and modern, sharp glass corners rubbing hard against the beautiful old buildings beside it. Inside the elevator where the world is all smoked glass and gold fixtures, the dissonance rings less in Jim’s temples.

Sebastian shifts restlessly beside him. Jim can feel the weight of Sebastian’s eyes on the nape of his neck. It’s making him develop _ticks._ Jim’s been toying with a slip of half-formed plan for a while now – something involving ground-up caffeine pills and everything Sebastian eats for the next week.

_Then I’ll nag **you** to sleep every four minutes, you muscle-bound **cock.**_

Jim realizes his mind is drifting and refocuses with a blink. The elevator doors chime for the sixth floor, and slide seamlessly open. Jim can appreciate the elegance of the whisper-quiet mechanism.

The sixth level of the building has an almost completely open plan; one vast, sparsely decorated board-room characterized by floor to ceiling windows and transparent glass dividers. Keeping it all clean must be murder. While the floorings below had been marble, up on sixth they’re bamboo; polished within an inch of their life and a rare shade of just-off-white. With the sun streaming in unimpeded from three directions at once, the room seems ethereal and shadeless.

It makes Jim’s head hurt. He squints his eyes against the bright light, sunbeams bouncing off the floor up behind his eyelids. Sebastian, without comment, slides on a pair of sunglasses. Pretentious ass.

In a circle of comfortable chairs at the far end of the room, there’re four men waiting. Old, powerful Italian men, heirs to the banking empire that drove Europe into the dirt twice before even the Plague had a chance. Three body guards hover behind them. _And I’m about to blackmail them all into doing what I want. That’s **power** , darling._ Jim feels a bit giddy, although – and don’t tell Sebastian – that could be lack of sleep talking.

He keeps drifting through thoughts like under-water currents. They snag him and pull him away from whatever he’s supposed to be doing, and maybe he should have at least closed his eyes for a –

_I sound like Sebastian, isn’t that funny._

_And by funny I mean, **entirely** aggravating. _

\---------------

The room heaves and swings like a boat on the ocean. Jim clutches at the skin of his wrists, wringing his hands. His skin feels smooth and warm, deliciously enticing to touch. He can’t stop rubbing his thumb on this bit over his pisiform bone which he’s pretty sure is actually _faultless._ Jim’s a little concerned that he’s going to rub his bone all the way gone, but then, the boundary between what’s under his skin and the outside world has gotten a bit funny anyways. Maybe he could rub his skin away and be fine after all; just become part of a larger, living _something_.

Reality has lost all molecular cohesion.

Jim takes a deep breath. The air explodes like pop-rocks in his chest.

It’d actually feel _nice,_ if he’d chosen it. If he knew what would happen next.

_If I’m like this forever, oh, well – imagine how awful it’d be! Or how wonderfully good –_

For a half-second Jim’s thoughts are clear, and he thinks, _this has to be only the start of Sherringford’s plan._ But the room lurches and swings and Jim drowns in a chemical tide.

\---------------

Sometime during negotiations about a shipment of ketamine from India, Jim passes out. It’s only for a heartbeat – his chin nodding down towards his chest – and no one catches it when he startles back awake.

He’s pretty sure, anyways.

Jim digs the nail of his index finger into the pad of his thumb, hard, leaving a white crescent of pressure behind. _Focus,_ he instructs himself strictly, and tries to pay attention to what the Florentines are talking about.

It’s much more difficult than it should be. The light from the windows and polished floor jag into his brain like shards of crystal. There’s a hollow, demanding feeling in his stomach. The muscles of his arms ache. It’s hard to tear his mind away from how miserable he feels enough to pay attention. Thinking about it is making it worse, of course, but –

_How long since I slept? Do I even remember anymore?_

It’s when Jim starts to think _maybe Sebastian had a point_ that he _really_ knows he’s fucked.

The second time he passes out everyone notices.

Jim falls into a warm dark pit and comes to with a gunshot bang. When he opens his eyes again, the four bankers in expensive Italian suits are staring at something just above him, bug-eyed and shocked. There’s a heavy hand on Jim’s shoulder, fingers digging in, holding him upright. One of the bodyguards sprawls backwards on the floor, blood seeping out over the bamboo flooring. The other three are in the process of putting their weapons down, and raising their hands.

Jim blinks owlishly, and looks up. Sebastian’s face has completely drained of humanity. He’s got a hot Jericho 941 in his hand, still trained on the other guards.

“Anyone else who thinks they can take advantage of Jim,” Sebastian is saying, with his tight _I’m-polite-but-also-homicidal_ smile, “Eats bullets.”

\---------------

There’s a shadowy figure in the doorway of Jim’s cell. Their outline is indistinct and distorted to the point of inhumanity, but that being said – there’s only one person it could be.

_Knew you’d come for me._

“And what time do you call this?” Jim quips, standing up to meet them, and then the room tilts dizzily on its axis and he feels himself falling sideways – or maybe upwards. He’s dimly aware of Sebastian catching him right before his head hits the bedframe. Reality seems gauzy, and not particularly insistent on being taken seriously. Sebastian pulls Jim in, and the warmth of his chest is solid and comforting. Jim takes a breath in through gritted teeth, feeling heat surge and warp through his bones. “He – Sherringford dosed me with some sort of – ”

“I know, Boss. I know.”

“And _you_ –”

“Hey. I’m here now. Shh…”

“Don’t comfort me. I’m going to _disembowel_ you, Tiger. How long does it take to escape a _cell_ and come find me?” Jim thumps his fist against Sebastian’s chest, but there’s no strength to the blow and it goes glancing off sideways without impact. Sebastian bends his head, contrite. Jim’s finding it hard to focus his eyes.

\---------------

He coughs a little, drawing the attention of the room. The banker’s heads swivel, paying terrified attention. One of them has a trickle of sweat running down his neck to the collar of his suit. Jim straightens in his chair and brushes Seb’s hand from his shoulder.

Sebastian gets the hint and obediently takes his hand the fuck off Jim. “Good to have you back, Boss.”

“Yes, well. What would I do without you to watch over me?”

“Fucked if I know, Boss.”

Jim cracks his knuckles, then his neck. The few heartbeats of sleep haven’t helped and it’s only a matter of time before he’s knocked out again. He’s vaguely irritated by that. _Worked so hard to put these four in place…_ Everyone is watching him in wary silence, except for Sebastian. He knows what’s coming. _Can’t let them live now. Not after they’ve seen…_

Jim stands abruptly, and the bankers flinch gratifyingly backwards. He gives them a wide, friendly smile, and beckons to one of their guards. A tanned, muscular man, maybe two inches shorter than the others; he’ll do.

After a moment of rather idiotic hesitation the man steps forward. Jim twirls his finger in the air, illustratively – the man turns around. _Perfect._

Jim can’t see his face anymore, but he can watch the faces of the others. They’re petrified again. _Good._ Just the way Jim likes them.

Jim pauses for effect. **_Beat,_** _two, three, four…_ then he gives the body guard a brutal kick to the back of the knee. Air leaving his lungs in a thick grunt, the man falls. He catches himself with a squeak on the palms of his hands, bent forward over the bamboo floor.

“Make a line, boys!” Jim trills at the other men in the room. “Do you know what happened to the Towers of Florence? Because you’ve gotten a teensy bit arrogant. Our friend here is going to be my Palazzo de Popolo. Do you get the reference? Anyone of you that stands taller than him is getting cut down to _size_.”

They debate disobeying him. He can see it in their eyes. But Sebastian is at his shoulder with a gun and a cold-steel stare, so even though they’re walking to the gallows they don’t stay where they are.

Jim watches them form a line in front of him, and fights his sleepy darkness tooth and nail.

“Too _tall,_ ” he sings, with an effort preserving his normal tone. “ _Down will come bankers, cradle and…_ Go ahead, Sebastian.”

Six shots in quick succession.

When they’re dead, Jim feels his knees give out as he lets go of self-control. His last thought, as he tumbles towards the ground, is _what **would** I do without you?_

\---------------

“I really hope you have a way out of here,” Jim tells Sebastian. His voice sounds robotic, vibrating uncomfortably in his ear drums. Sebastian makes a face at him. The details of Sebastian’s face shake in time with Jim’s voice, blurring out in fractal patterns.

Above him, the shadow of the light as it sways looks like bird wings.

“Isn’t it enough that I’m here? You do the thinking, Boss.”

“Well, _yeah._ But I soooooort of expecteeed…”

Jim’s voice is making him unhappy. He takes a deep breath and stops talking. Sebastian brushes a stray piece of hair from his forehead, where it’s stuck to a patch of sweat and dirt. His fingertips feel like supernovas, painfully hot against Jim’s skin.

Jim nearly _moans_. It feels like the completion of a puzzle.

Sebastian’s voice goes careful and wary. “Boss…”

“ _Don’t._ Don’t _talk.”_

Jim takes another deep breath, but it doesn’t help. Sebastian’s fingers ghost down his cheek, over his throat. Jim feels them press dimly inwards as Sebastian takes his pulse. It’s racing; Jim can tell from the tightness of his chest, can feel it throb against Seb’s fingers.

“You should be careful,” Sebastian says. “Your heart’s out of control…”

“I don’t give a _fuck,_ ” Jim snaps, “Just – ” For a moment he’s not even sure what he wants. His mouth moves before his brain. “Touch me again.”

“What?”

“ _Touch me again._ ” It’s like Jim’s body is functioning on autopilot. Or maybe it just doesn’t want to take direction anymore. He sucks in deep, gulping lungfuls of air, and his skin pricks and tingles everywhere he and Sebastian aren’t in contact. “Don’t _argue with me, JUST DO IT!_ ”

His voice rings flat against the hard concrete walls. He expects Seb to protest, really. Fighting its way up through the waves of intoxication, that small part of Jim that always holds back screams, _we’re in the heart of danger._ He should know better. He does know better. But he needs Sebastian’s hands on his skin like a drowning man needs a rope.

There’s far too much clothing on both of them.

Jim pulls at Sebastian’s shirt, and after a moment Seb gives in and starts stripping. He’s wearing two jackets – god knows why – but it only takes him a second to drop them both to the ground.

It’s still a second too long.

There’s a scar at the base of his neck that Jim touches first, running his fingers along the raised, reddened skin. It wrinkles with the pressure of his touch. Jim has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from moaning. Everything just feels _good,_ feels _too good._

There’s a dim part of his brain that’s screaming at him to stop. This is deadly in a way that few things they’ve done have ever been – he took Sebastian in the middle of a job, once, but there was never anything as dangerous as –

Under Jim’s fingers at the hollow of Sebastian’s throat he can feel Seb’s heart.

_Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. I need –_

_I need. I just need._

Jim pulls back enough to throw his own clothes after Sebastian’s on the floor. First his shirt, and then without stopping, his trousers. Pants.

“Boss, what are you – ”

“I said don’t argue, Seb. Please. Just – just do it. Just don’t ask.”

Sebastian understands what he means. Sebastian _always_ understands. He strips with military efficiency. When Seb’s naked, Jim gestures wordlessly to the hard bunk by the wall – not trusting himself to speak.

_I need to feel every inch of you against my skin and I don’t really care how it happens I just want it to happen._

Sebastian, after a moment’s hesitation, lies down. Jim’s vision blurs out again as he looks at Seb on the bed, and he can’t see the comet-trail scar on Seb’s ribs. He wishes he could. He wants to. Trace it with his fingers and make Sebastian twitch in his sleep –

Sebastian reaches up and takes Jim’s wrist, drawing Jim down onto him. Jim straddles him, and the first contact of his thighs with Sebastian’s skin makes him shudder. It makes the skin of his scalp prickle like someone’s poured cold water down his spine.

Sebastian pulls at his wrist again and Jim folds himself forward, onto Sebastian’s chest. He presses down as hard as he can, crushing Seb into the cot, trying to get as much as possible of their skin into contact. Everywhere Sebastian touches him Jim can feel heat and warmth and it’s like being wrapped in terrifying perfection.

He’s there without moving for three heartbeats – counts them out as they leap in his throat. Then Sebastian slides a finger under his chin, tilts his head up, and kisses him.

Jim’s brain cells light up like neon. Oh. _Oh._

He’s never gotten hard so quickly in his _life._ He’s not even sure what Sebastian’s tongue is _doing –_ it rips him apart neuron by neuron. Jim can’t even collect himself to give back as good as he gets; all he can do is moan and let Sebastian demolish him with a kiss.

He falls downwards into it, catching himself with his palms on the mattress. Underneath him, Sebastian arcs upwards, the curve of his back like –

Like –

_Sherlock on Sebastian in the monitor feed. The slim line of light between Seb’s back and the floor. Soundless but from the way Sebastian’s lips part he’s just gasped, and Sherlock grinds down –_

The memory is so vivid Jim can feel the tingle of the monitor static on his skin, and all of a sudden, things are _wrong._

He swallows, hard, and falls off Sebastian onto the other side of the cot.

“Jim,” Sebastian says, “What –“

_Not like this._

Jim grabs Seb’s wrist and uses it to draw him over, so Sebastian’s body fits over his. Warm weight presses him into the bed. A hand runs through his hair. Their bodies fit together perfectly, like yin and yang, and Jim groans. _This. This._ He rolls his hips upward, against Sebastian’s cock, and the friction makes him bite his lip and whimper. Sebastian noses at his ear.

“Here? You like this?” Jim feels knuckles brush down his stomach, and the hair on the back of his neck rises. Sebastian wraps one hand around both of them. His grip is tight and calloused, one finger set at an angle so the roughness of his fingerprint tugs Jim’s skin. He whines, the sound loud in the stillness. Sebastian’s breath is hot on his neck. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted…”

_You had me all along, Tiger._

Sebastian grinds his hips downward. His hand twists downwards as his body moves forward, opposing motions driving the air from Jim’s lungs. He clutches at Sebastian’s bare shoulders, fingernails digging into the muscle until Sebastian hisses and bites down in revenge.

The bright pain on Jim’s neck and the pleasure of Sebastian’s body against his overwhelm everything else. His vision narrows down to darkness even before he shuts his eyes. Tiger is _marking_ him, Tiger is _claiming_ him, and the thought echoes in each thrust of Sebastian’s body against his.

Jim tosses his head back against the cot, panting for breath. With his eyes closed sensation is even more intense. He can feel the slickness of the sweat on Sebastian’s chest, the overly-hot soft skin on the inside of his hip. Jim can feel each wrinkle in Sebastian’s fingerprint, each hard place where his bones are close to the skin. He’s so hard his cock aches, but he can’t seem to come.

“Please, Seb,” Jim hears himself saying, “Oh God, **_please_** , _make me come –_ ”

He half feels he’ll never make. The ebb and rush of warmth from the drugs in his veins wears him out, leaves him used-up and gasping with each harsh breath of air he manages to force down. His skin feels _golden,_ gauzy, and just the softness of Sebastian’s lips alone should be enough to send him fractalling out into oblivion. But it’s not enough.

He whines, thrusting awkwardly up into Seb’s hand as much as he can.

_Oh, fuck, close. So close. Why can’t I –_

“Dammit, Seb, please, _please_ – “ If it were anyone else Jim would hate himself for that. If it were Sherlock, if he was sober – Jim wouldn’t be caught dead. But if Jim has weak spots, they belong to Sebastian. “I – I need –“

“What do you need, Boss?” Sebastian’s voice, low and throaty in his ear. Rough from the strain of holding back. He sounds like he does when Jim pulls him back from a kill at that last moment, like he’s just as dangerously close to losing as Jim is.

_Only you, Tiger._

“I need you.” As soon as Jim says it he feels the words explode in his stomach, golden sparks of light. He seems to catch on the thought, a broken record, and each time he says it, it pushes him closer. “I need you. I need you. I – oh,FUCK, _Sebastian – ”_

Every nerve in Jim’s body sparks into pleasure at once. The warmth in his stomach and his lungs explodes upwards, firing on every electrical circuit in his body from the tips of his toes to his tingling scalp. He cries out with the force of it, barely feeling himself spurt over Sebastian’s fingers because he is _gone_ , he is _obliterated,_ his consciousness isn’t trapped in his brain, it’s every inch of his skin all dripping in pure light all at once.

Jim’s heart could stop, and he wouldn’t care. He buries his teeth in Seb’s shoulder to muffle his sobs, each aftershock of his orgasm twice as good as any fuck he’s had in his life.

Sebastian says something – Jim doesn’t even hear it – it doesn’t matter.

Sebastian’s voice is in his ear and if Jim has to be vulnerable, he will only _ever_ show them to Sebastian.

\---------------

Sherlock’s fingers are stained yellow from smoking, just between the first and second digit of his index finger. Jim watches him on the balcony from a rumpled bed. It’s quiet, too early in the morning for the noise of the city to be over-powering. The sun is just starting to rise and the sky is a fragile creamy grey.

Sherlock is naked, sitting bent forward so the wall of the balcony shields him from view. It’s warm enough to go without clothing and besides – if anyone saw Sherlock at this apartment with Jim, they’d have bigger problems than public indecency charges.

The room smells like sex and smoke. The once-crisp white sheets are damp with sweat and other, less sanitary fluids. Sherlock’s back is crusted with thin lines of blood from Jim’s nails, and Jim’s neck is stiff with bruising.

Jim presses himself a little closer into the pillows, and inhales deeply. Sex and smoke, blood and the two of them.

He feels hollow, head to toe, like he’s ground the insides of himself away against Sherlock’s sharp edges. It’s not even an _angry_ feeling. Just quiet, and empty.

_I never thought you’d be boring._

Jim has to admit, he’s disappointed. He thought he’d found something worth _staying_ for.

\---------------

Afterwards, Jim falls asleep – nude body curled awkwardly to make room for the other man on the small cot beside him.

Sherringford, comfortable and grinning in his own nakedness, leans over and kisses Jim between the shoulder blades. His breath raises goosebumps on Jim’s skin, just down and to the left of a bruise. In his sleep, Jim cringes his shoulders away from the contact with a faint noise of protest. He tries desperately to wake up, but Sherringford’s judged the dosage too well to let that.

“Seb, we have to…”

“Don’t worry, Boss.” Sherringford tells him. “We’re together now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

\---------------


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John and Sebastian have always reflected each other; born on the battlefield and inevitable as death, their lives play out like sides of a single coin. John can't help but find it deeply unsettling; as for Sebastian, well, /unsettling/ is what he does best.

Sherlock wrenches his arm free of John’s grip. “As long as the door isn’t locked, if we’re all done gossiping, we might consider _leaving._ ” He runs a hand through his curls, fixing them. They fall carelessly into place. Sebastian hates him a little for that.

He does, however, take the reminder to sort out his own clothing.

Sherlock must be out of the worst of the withdrawals, now. His back is straight, jaw squared. He straightens his collar and tugs his shirt down to cover his track marks with a sidelong glance at John. He looks presentable, if grimy. Still skeletal, but the feverish paleness is gone from his skin; Sherlock looks less like Jim when he’s healthy.

Sebastian wipes blood from his face onto his knuckles and holds it up illustratively – fresh and bright against the dark brown scabbing. “I’m not in much condition to move.”

“That’s fine, we’ll leave you.”

“No, Sherlock, we won’t.” John sighs. His fist swings as he scowls, bumping against his thigh. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but we can’t leave him. Not after – ”

A hundred things to end that sentence with and John can’t pick any of them. Sebastian gives John a considering look and John looks levelly back, not intimidated in the slightest; but he’s not about to continue either.

 _Weak,_ Sebastian thinks, but he tells John, “ ’Appreciate it,” anyways. He does. There’s a part of him that’s starting to think all the soft weak spots in John are pillowed coatings over steel. After all, John could have had a normal life and he chose Sherlock; same as Sebastian chose Jim.

 _Maybe that’s how John fights it down,_ Sebastian thinks, _maybe he keeps his touch soft on purpose because he knows just how rough he can be._

“No man left behind, as the Americans say.” John smiles wryly at Moran. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Thought you’d make an exception, considering.”

John frowns. “Considering what? I took the Hippocratic Oath, after all. I’m not going to leave an injured man in a prison cell if I can get him out.”

“Even though you may save more lives by killing me here?”

John founders between a doctor’s response, and a soldier’s. Sebastian wonders exactly which victim of Jim’s John is picturing with that painful expression.

“Is there a point to this?” Sherlock interrupts from the door. “Or can we get moving.”

Without another word, John shoves his hands under Sebastian’s armpits and heaves him to his feet. Sebastian stumbles, nearly over-balancing them both, but John plants his feet and steadies them. He slings one of Sebastian’s arms around his shoulders, braces his palm on Sebastian’s chest.

“We aren’t much different, you know,” Sebastian tells him. Their faces are close enough together that he doesn’t have to raise his voice much over a rumble in his chest for John to hear.

John grunts with the effort of supporting half Sebastian’s weight. “How do you figure that?”

“We both swore ourselves to queen and country, didn’t we? And when we came back from the war, we did mostly the same thing – ”

At this point, apparently, John feels enough is enough. “You started _killing people!_ ” he interjects, sounding distinctly offended.

_There’s a cabby with a bullet through his chest who wants a word with you, John._

“So did you. We both found something we loved more than the law, didn’t we?”

\---------------

The world is a grey, lazy place, and John hates it. It drags at him, pulling his shoulders towards the ground like the air is thick and weighted. He feels better when he gets out of bed, but he still can’t manage that most days. He lies on top of his sheets, poking at the keys of his laptop, and can never remember what he spends his time doing. He stops eating, because the weight in his gut makes him feel useless and sluggish.

Or because he doesn’t remember to eat. Or because he’s not awake often enough.

When he doesn’t have nightmares, he sleeps as much as he can. The blinds on his flat stay closed, and it’s never brighter than twilight in his room. He could sleep forever, if he wanted. His family’s far away. His job placement is still going through. Veteran Affairs has said they’re very happy to provide a councillor, and while she tries hard to be helpful, she can’t watch him all the time.

John thinks of his gun in the drawer with weary self-loathing.

He craves it, sometimes. Thinks about how the barrel will feel slipping between his lips like he thinks about sex. He imagines himself blown outwards, all the unique neurons that make up _John Watson_ spattered up across the wall like the Milky Way.

But when his thumb rests on the cold metal and he tries to steel himself for the final act, he can’t. He remembers Kandahar. Kids that barely knew how to shave, shrieking out curses under his hands. Dustoff screaming in over the horizon like the wrath of god, and the dead soldiers that had fought so hard to make it back to basecamp. John feels their weight hard on the back of his neck when he thinks about killing himself; a never-ending sets of army boots, standing on his shoulders, pushing him down in their vain attempts to clamber up out of hell. Any one of the men John lost during the war would take his place in a heartbeat. They’d be grateful.

He tries not to feel like he’s letting them down by giving up.

He sets out an apple for himself every morning and tries hard to remember to eat it; sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes he gets dressed and makes it as far as the door before he rationalizes going back to bed.

The room is always dim, and so is John. For long hours he sits on his cleanly made mattress and stares at the light through the blinds. His hands shake, badly, like the aftermath of adrenaline.

The thought that he will always be in the aftermath of the war makes him feel sick, so he tries not to think about it.

\---------------

“It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“For Christ’s sake, stop comparing us! You had a gun to an old lady – to a _child –_ ”

“I’d do it again, too. And so would you.” John stares at Sebastian disbelievingly. Sebastian sighs. “Come on, Watson. Don’t look at me like that. You’re telling me, if he told you it was necessary – if he told you to shut up and trust him –you wouldn’t pull the trigger.”

John stays uncomfortably silent. He looks away. His breath huffs steadily against Sebastian’s cheek as they limp down the hallway together.

“You owe him everything,” Sebastian tells him. John is watching the straight V of Sherlock’s back in the hall before them, “And you trust him more than you should, considering how inhuman he can be. I told you, Watson. We have a fair amount in common.”

\---------------

The medevac helicopter’s call sign is “Dustoff.” The horror and anxiety of Afghanistan, the thing that keeps John awake at night, is six words; _Dustoff inbound. Keep him awake._

He’s outside of Kandahar in 2009. His hands press down on the wound of some out-of-place kid who seems to drown in his combat uniform. The patrol taking defensive positions around them is choked in dust, already rust-red from blood. John scans the horizon for the dark blur that means Dustoff is in sight, but with thick heat lines shimmering up off the sand he can’t even be sure he’s squinting in the right direction.

Dustoff is the fastest transport helicopter they have, but to John it always seems to inch its way torturously across the sky.

He presses his hands tighter against the boys gut. Gut wounds are bad; they’ve always been bad, and John thinks they’ll always _be_ bad. The reek of blood and intestine is thick on the air, like butcher’s sausages being cut. The smell is so visceral it almost has a physical presence, mixed up in dirt until it’s a fine paste that coats John’s throat. John coughs into his shoulder, harsh and barking, the inside of his mouth tasting chalky and try as the sand around them. The soldier underneath him is screaming.

In the CHU Sebastian is pouring himself a drink. He started that after Kosovo - beer back then, but now it’s a fermented horror made of goats milk that he buys off the Kurds to the North. The stuff is sweet and brutal strong. Train hard, fight hard, drink hard; getting smashed is a function of every unit member, but Sebastian is a special case. He can’t sleep without it. Can’t function. On long deployments, when alcohol is scarce, Sebastian says nothing for days.

The fermented goat’s milk oozes down his throat like honey.

John tastes blood on his tongue and gags, burying his mouth in his shoulder to get it out of the air. Around him, men are shouting. Sound is buried beneath a constant chatter of suppressive fire from the SA80 A2’s of his patrol, and the loud bark of his point man’s 12 gauge.

“Dustoff’s in the air,” Blackthorne tells Sebastian, on his way back from the helipad.

“Yeah?” Uninterested, Sebastian takes another swig.

“Say they’ve got a casualty down in the Fifth Fusiliers.”

“Fuck.” Standard response. No sympathy behind it.

The sound of Dustoff coming over the horizon is like the beat of Gabriel’s wings. John swears he hears angelic choirs. Under his hands, the boy is fading quick – bruised eyelids fluttering against his freckled cheeks. John takes a hand off the kid’s wound to slap him, brusquely, the movement quick and efficient. His hand leaves a blood smear on the boy’s pale cheekbone that clots and snags on rough patches of unevenly shaved skin.

_Keep him awake._

“Should be inbound now,” Blackthorne continues, resolutely not taking the hint. “Think they’ll send a second patrol out?”

“Blackthorne?”

“Yes?”

“Get the fuck out of my face.”

John’s losing him. “No, no, no – come on, now – “

Before Sebastian can go back to the dark brown bottle in his hands, the call goes out – “Suit up! We’re Oscar Mike!” He swings his boots to the dirt and stands without pause, throwing the bottle aside in favour of his rifle. He’s the only one in his squad with the menacing length of a L115A3 leaned up against his bed, and it’s never out of arm’s reach. He’s halfway to the transport before the rest of the men even have their boots done up.

_Oh **god** yes._

Dustoff’s almost here. The great clouds of sand blown up by the helicopter’s approaching blades washes over John. He works fast, hands scrambling, trying to stabilize the young casualty enough for transport.

Sebastian straps himself into the helicopter, right by the load doors.

His heart pounds.

His hands are blood-soaked but steady.

His mouth is dry.

His chest is tight.

His skin tingles, scalp to toe-nails, adjusting to a rush of adrenaline.

He takes a shallow, short breath, air clear and impossibly sweet in his lungs.

_Almost there._

_Here we go._

\---------------

In front of them in the hallway Sherlock’s lean back and jutting shoulder blades make him look like a bird of prey. Light rims him dark curls like a halo as he strides under each hanging bulb, disappearing just as fast into shadow as he leaves them behind.

John and Sebastian stumble along in his wake, Sebastian still leaning heavily on John as his body cries protests.

“I don’t think he’s untouchable,” John says, apropos nothing.

“Yes, you do.”

“And I don’t put him on a pedestal – ” Sebastian raises his eyebrows, not that John can see in the position they’re in. He trusts John to read it in his posture – gather meaning from the tightness of shoulders and the shift of his gait rather than words.

Soldier’s trick. “He’s too much of a git for me to _idolize_ him” John protests to Moran’s silence.

Their tread in the hall is uneven, a shambling half-shuffling mess like Frankenstein’s monster. “Sometimes you feel like he can’t see you at all,” Sebastian says quietly, half to himself. “He’s too big to see you. Giant. Towering. And you’re nothing. You’re only human, and he’s so, so much more…”

John’s silence is damning. “…It’s not like that with us,” he says, when it’s already far too late for denial to be plausible.

“Isn’t it?”

\---------------

Seb is craving the end like a kiss when he meets Moriarty. He hasn’t got enough money in the world to buy himself a pack of cigarettes, let alone a bed for the night, and if it ends here – in a rain-soaked ditch outside of Thornhill – well, it ends here.

So much the world’s loss.

Once upon a time, Seb had been the best. He isn’t the best anymore – he isn’t even sure if he remembers what it was he was the best _at_ – but he’d been on top of the heap once. So fuck ‘em for spitting on him now.

A piece of newspaper in the wind blows over his face, covering his eyes, and Seb lets it lie there. He knows that’s disgusting. He hates the drips of ink and mud that run from the corner of the paper under the collar of his once-white shirt. Can’t bring himself to move, though. Can’t bring himself to care.

Sebastian sinks deeper in the ditch. He hates Thornhill. He hates Wales. He hates the UK. Miserable rainy place, with awful food and inconsequential people.

He misses Kandahar, and Laos. He misses the tigers. Sometimes, under the dreary gray of England’s skies, he thinks he dreamt them – conjured the images out of smoke and battle stress. Surely there was never anything that bright or beautiful in the world.

Above him, on the street by the bank of the ditch, two men pause.

“He reeks of booze,” one of them complains in rapid-fire Kurdish, “Besides, the man we’re looking for is in his late twenties. The highest-ranked sniper in British military. Not some old bum in a ditch.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” Apparently it’s possible to speak Kurdish with an Irish accent. Sebastian almost wants to look upwards, but he’s held stiffly in place by apathy and exhaustion. “Pull him out of the ditch and hose him down. Thoroughly. I want him ready to work in three days.” There’s a pause, and the speaker switches from flawless Kurdish to deep, lilting English. “Come on, Moran. Let’s go hunt tigers.”

\---------------

After a long silence, John starts again. Hesitantly, pitching his voice so Sherlock can’t hear, he murmurs to Sebastian, “When you said, we _both_ want…”

“That’s exactly what I meant.”

John opens his mouth to respond. However, Sebastian never finds out what he has to say on the subject of mutual desire.

“ _Sst! “_ Sherlock hisses, “Both of you. Jim’s up ahead.” He doesn’t mention Sherringford. Maybe he doesn’t dare. Maybe he thinks if Sherringford was dumb enough to release John, he’s not worth worrying about.

Sherlock doesn’t know it, of course, but he’s playing right into Sherringford’s plan.

\---------------

John is – deep in the pit of his stomach – secretly terrified Sherlock will find out.

Since moving to 221B, John knows that everything he does can be read without his permission; in the turn of his sleeves, in the eyelets on his shoelaces. Sherlock never misses _anything._

Trying to hide ten minutes to rush out a wank is a humiliating nightmare and, as a consequence, John thinks about Sherlock far more than he should when he’s got his fist wrapped around his cock.

At least he tells himself he’s thinking about Sherlock because he has to keep things hidden.

It’s not until one night when Sherlock is out chasing arms dealers that John admits to himself he thinks of Sherlock for far more… related reasons. At first, alright, it was just because he had to be careful; but then it was because of the promising curve of Sherlock’s lips, and the confident touch of his violinist’s fingers.

John tries to fight the association away with logic all evening. He sits in front of the telly with his fists clenched determinedly at his side, staring fixedly forward. He’s _not_ going to touch himself thinking about Sherlock. He’s _not_ going to picture Sherlock on his knees, sardonic smile playing around his lips, eyebrow raised up at John. He is _not_ getting hard to this _, dammit_ –

Only he is. He’s _aching._ The room feels ten degrees too hot. He has to breathe shallowly through his mouth, and drop his head back against his chair. _It’ll be just this once,_ he lies to himself, _you’ll get it out of your system. Then you won’t think about him again._

No matter how he tries to explain it away, thinking about Sherlock has John rock-hard and desperate. It doesn’t make him _gay,_ but he’s completely fixated anyways. John wants nothing more than to get a grip in those thick dark curls and make Sherlock’s eyes water, jamming a cock down his throat.

John groans, loud in the empty flat. The mental image is unnecessarily vivid. His trousers are painfully tight. He palms himself over them, but it doesn’t seem to help – his cock strains against the fabric, warm and heavy in his hand.

 _Ah, for Christ’s sake –_ he thinks, _fuck it._ Maybe that’s when he knows he’s well and truly over his head – when he opens the button and the mere brush of his fingers over the bare skin of his lower stomach makes him gasp.

He shoves his hand under his pants and wraps three fingers and a thumb around the base of his cock. He can already feel his pulse between his fingers, heavy and jumping.

_If I’m going to do this, might as well do it properly – might as well think of – of –_

John strokes himself, base to tip, and at the same time pictures Sherlock - hot off the end of a case and panting, slamming John up against the door on Baker Street.

John has to click his teeth shut over a moan.

_Oh, Christ, that’s good._

Slow, steady strokes for now; John shifts his hips up in the chair so he can free himself a bit more from his trousers. They pool around his thighs and he pictures Sherlock in the lab at St. Bart’s – irascible, snapping, sending sensitive equipment flying as he pins John down and _takes_ what he wants –

John’s breath rasps in his lungs. A steady stream of pre-cum forms at the tip of his cock, slicking his fingers as his strokes get tighter and faster. The sound of the television in front of him fades away –

_Sherlock, leaning over at a crime scene to whisper lewd things in my ear, ah, fuck, Sherlock with a dildo inside him, pulling it out and having me take him in public –_

His thoughts are getting less cohesive. John makes a fist and thrusts his hips up into it, faster and faster, panting for breath. A thin film of sweat forms on his bare stomach.

_Sherlock spread open on my fingers, **demanding** I make him come. Sherlock bent over the table. Sherlock bending **me** over the table. Sherlock sitting in his chair, with me in his lap, hands on my hip and my cock rocking against him while he tells me how much he loves fucking – fucking me – _

“Oh, _Christ,_ ” John says, to the empty room. His hips jerk upwards hard. “Oh, bloody fucking Christ – “

_Sherlock stroking himself, leaning against the wall with his chin on his chest, panting, thinking about me – Sherlock’s voice, low and broken, oh **John,** right there – his hand fitted over the back of mine, pining it to the blanket as I arch my back and his fucking cock – his cock – **fuck** – his **cock in me –**_

The last thought is too much for John. His mind supplies a hundred thousand fantasies and images, each vivid and demanding, endlessly detailed – and all involving Sherlock.

His orgasm is brutal, unforgiving. It rips through him and leaves him limp and panting, unable to move or clean himself. He stays where he is in his chair until he thinks his knees will support him, and thanks god no one was there to hear him whimper, “ _Sherlock!_ ”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are pieces of us that belong to the people we love the most:
> 
> Or, caring is an advantage Jim and Sherlock both think their opponent doesn't have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seb and Jim are quoting the Faerie Queene, which is a Book/Poem from 1590 and can be read [ here ](http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/queene1.html)if you really like ye Olde Literature.
> 
> The car Seb drives is [ here. ](http://www.topgear.com/uk/imageresize/image.jpg?OriginalImageUrl=%2Fuk%2Fassets%2Fcms%2F788f3f0b-9193-47dc-bde7-12fae2e77328%2FLarge+Image.jpg%3Fp%3D131115_03%3A09&Width=615&Height=347)
> 
> And if you want a bit of a laugh, I write out all my chapters [in this format ](http://oi61.tinypic.com/2zix5ad.jpg)before I you know, actually write them (sort of like doing forms as an artist) and I am sorry some of the joke dialogue can't make it into the final piece (pretty sure John spent four chapters with "u wot m8" as his only dialogue, brilliant, I'm an A+ author)
> 
> Oh! and there's some new mormor art up on [my tumblr](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/post/78712281311)
> 
> Sorry I meant to link things before and never got around to it so have a linkstorm at the top of this chapter. Which is a bit fucked, by the way. Um. Yep... hope y'all are in a kinky mood. See you soon! <3
> 
> EDIT: Another fucking link!  
> Art of Sherringford Holmes so you can see how I picture him! [Does he look the same to you?](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/post/79259793902/for-those-of-you-who-read-separation)

In the spaces between each light bulb, Sherlock fades into darkness, like he’s walking down a street at night falling into the gaps between streetlamps. Sebastian fixates on the wrinkled and beaten backs of his shoes, because Sherlock’s purposeful stride is just regular enough to be stabilizing and Sebastian’s head feels light. Sherlock is a far cry from the shuddering junkie he’d been only hours ago, now that John’s here.

_Withdrawal is not that short of a process._

Sherlock’s still twitching; just hiding it better. Sebastian wonders if John can see how much composure costs Sherlock. How the bones of his shoulder blades draw defensively together. Somehow, Seb doubts it.

At his side, John is steady, the palm of his hand warm on Seb’s chest as he keeps them both upright. Sebastian focuses on that. The walk to Jim’s cell is a miserable thing, endured only because it _must_ be endured. Sebastian’s not sure why he’s hurting so bad. He’s certainly taken worse before. It’s something in his head… or maybe it’s an ache in his muscles, a lethargy that’s bone-deep and poisonous. In the dead silence, each footfall is loud and painfully obvious. The rustle of cloth sends echoing whispers off the walls. It seems impossible that no one will hear them coming.

John is breathing harder, lips parted as he shoulders more of Sebastian’s weight. Sebastian screws up his face and tries to limp a little better. If it wasn’t Jim on the other end of the gauntlet, Seb would just sit down by the wall and wait for the guards to find him. Screw escaping. Even with his muscles screaming protest and pain making straight thoughts difficult, he could probably take a few with him.

Sebastian misses his footing and stumbles, sending John swaying over with a grunt. Somehow, he keeps them both upright. Sherlock doesn’t so much as turn his head to check on them. After each stretch of uninterrupted darkness, he passes a light and his hair shines with oil and sweat. It curls in uneven waves around the back of his neck.

Sherlock’s hair doesn’t look a thing like Jim’s, but Sebastian can still see the similarity in the way he doesn’t look back.

_Keep up or fall behind, I’ll do it with-or-without you._

Sebastian thinks if their places were switched Jim would have acted like Sherlock. _I can feel just how desperate you are, and I’m going to give you exactly what you want. You can pretend afterwards that you didn’t, of course…But we’ll both know…_ It even sounds like Jim.

\---------------

“Don’t you look cleaned up and pretty.”

Sebastian – with an effort – tears his attention away from the intricate crystal bowl on the table, full of brightly iced cupcakes. Each cupcake has been lovingly decorated with men being executed in a variety of nasty and creative ways.

The speaker is a short, slight Irish man, in a flawless suit and deep burgundy tie. He smiles mildly at Sebastian, blinking large owlish eyes. He looks like he stepped out of a magazine add. Or a clothing press. Sebastian gives him a long, hard once over; the kind that used to make American GIs get out of his way.

“Who’re you?”

“Jim Moriarty. _Hi._ ” Unconcerned by the inspection, small-short-and-stylish takes a seat opposite Sebastian in an armchair. The chair matches the couch Sebastian is sitting on; white upholstery embroidered thickly with gold, and gleaming mahogany at the arm bars. The furniture wouldn’t look out of place in Gloriana’s boudoir.

Jim leans forward and snags a cupcake off the table. “ _Much_ nicer look on you than newsprint,” he continues, peeling the wrapper off and dropping it to the table. The cupcake he’s chosen depicts a small figure being disemboweled. The level of detail is impressive, considering the confectionary medium. “I have to tell you, I’m incredibly curious what convinced _you_ to give up and die in a hole.”

Sebastian watches Jim pick at the icing of his cupcake. Light reflects off the white silk of the furniture and the pale cream walls, making Jim’s pale fingers seem to glow. There’s an otherworldly tinge to the whole encounter; something off kilter and strange. Sebastian says the first thing that pops into his head, without thinking; “ _No faith so fast, but flesh does paire_.”

Jim blinks, surprised. Then he laughs, tossing his head back, shoulders shaking. “Oh, Sebastian. I’m _Irish._ It doesn’t mean I’m a leprechaun.” He pops a piece of icing in his mouth and chews it, still grinning brightly. “We could play that game if you like, though. _What from one place falls, is unto another brought: there is nothing lost, that may not be found, if sought_.” Jim clips each word of the quote off neatly, pronouncing them in a carefully precise Gaelic accent. Then he wrenches his head to the side, making a face, and resumes his normal tones. “You should know that only makes me want you more.”

“Want me for what?”

“Your soul. Your virtue. Maybe I am fae, Sebastian Moran. Do you sell your soul to the Unseelie King?”

“What?”

“Joking…” Jim’s voice drops to a deep monotone. “Bored now. Here’s the _deal_ , Sebby darling. Here’s what you do.” He bites the head off the disemboweled man on his cupcake; sets it back down on the table. Crumbs sprawl out across the polished wood. “You keep yourself clean. You buy yourself a shiny new gun.”

“And…?”

“And when I send you a name, you _slaughter_ for me. Dog on a leash. I slip your chain, you…” Jim gestures vaguely before starting to lick red icing from his fingers; as if he’s made his point. Sebastian stares across the table at him.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you _want_ to, Sebby. Why do men like us anything? I’m certainly not going to _force_ you.” He glances up – meeting Sebastian’s eyes full on for the first time. There’s something huge and hungry behind his expression; something that makes Sebastian’s gut go hollow in fear. “I could, you know. But I won’t. I don’t have to.”

He stands, straightens his suit with a practiced tug, and slides a pair of dark sunglasses out of his trouser pocket. Sebastian stares up at him; suddenly, Jim Moriarty doesn’t seem _short_ anymore.

“Do a good job and maybe I’ll give you a dog bone, too,” Jim says, putting on his sunglasses. Sebastian can see himself reflected back in the inky black lenses. “ _Toodles.”_

Jim strolls out the door and Sebastian is left alone in the white and gold room. He stares at the cupcakes. The expensive furniture. His own scarred hands, clean and manicured for the first time in a year.

 _What the hell,_ he thinks. _Let’s go buy a gun._

\---------------

It doesn’t take long, in the vast scheme of things. Ten names. Just over eight months. To Sebastian it seems like an eternity.

Eight months is a long time to wait to see your employer a second time. At first, Seb couldn’t care less; so Jim isn’t a hands-on guy. So what? The work is good and every time he finishes a hit, frankly _embarrassing_ sums of money show up in his bank account. Slowly, though, Sebastian finds things out about Jim. Just bits and pieces, whenever he crosses paths with another one of Moriarty’s men; the drivers Jim sends before a hit, for instance, or the occasional second gun man. They know rumours; and the more Seb learns, the more he’s desperate to find out the truth. Mainly because the rumours are _insane._ Sebastian already knows a few of them aren’t even close to right, but the rest… he can’t help but wonder.

_He never sees anyone personally._

_I hear he’s actually NKVD – IRA – CIA._

_He’s been shot point-blank in the head and survived. He never sleeps in the same bed twice. He owns the French Government. He can have a bullet put in any man from here to Brazil, but he’s never killed anyone himself._

_He’s actually a woman – two men – twenty men – no, he’s a whole team of both genders, working around the clock just to keep up._

_He’s a myth._

_He’s a legend._

_He’s not real._

“Hello, Sebby. Don’t I owe you a dog bone?”

The voice crackles in over the Bluetooth speaker just as Seb’s taking a hairpin corner. He hydroplanes; wrestling his McLaren P1 under control by such a bare margin that he’s inches from wrapping himself around a tree.

“Jesus, Moriarty,” he snaps, almost before he can shove his heart back from his teeth and get his breathing under control. “A little fucking warning.” Jim giggles. For some reason, _that_ comes through loud and clear; the sound makes the skin over Sebastian’s stomach feel tight.

“That’s what I like about you, darling. Always so polite. _Polished._ ”

“You couldn’t pick a better fucking time to ring me up? Like say any time I’m moving _under_ a hundred miles an hour?”

“I could always skin you if you get _too_ rude,” Jim tosses back, playful. “I think you’d make an adorable rug.”

“Whatever gets you off,” Sebastian snipes. Jim giggles. “So, did you almost kill me just to flirt?” Against his will, Seb’s enjoying this. He grips the wheel of his car in one hand and shifts with the other, slowing down on the winding road so he can pay attention to Jim.

“ _No,_ ” Jim admits, with a dejected sigh, “Unfortunately. I really _do_ need to give you a treat. You’ve been absolutely flawless so far, and I’m not in the habit of saying that lightly.”

“You’re not in the habit of saying much at all.”

“True.”

“So why are you talking to – “

“ _Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies~”_ Jim interrupts, sing-song. “You’re about ten miles from the farm I’m using as a helicopter pad. Programming it into your GPS now. That car has a top speed of 217, doesn’t it? Why don’t you _show_ me _._ ”

Sebastian’s foot hits the floor on instinct, and the engine roars to life.

 _This man is going to kill me,_ he thinks, with a rush of pure adrenaline-fed elation.

\---------------

Jim’s helicopter takes Sebastian to a private plane, where Jim is waiting. He’s got a bottle of champagne on ice and an SVD Dragunov resting in his lap while he taps on a touch-screen phone.

Jim doesn’t look up as Sebastian takes the seat opposite him. “I didn’t know tigers screamed,” he says casually. “There’s an article on poaching in the Times. I thought of you.”

“It tell you to spear them through the throat?” Sebastian asks, reaching for the bottle.

“Mmm.”

Sebastian pours himself a glass. “You can also shoot their vocal chords out.”

That makes Jim look up. “Can you?” he asks, putting a different emphasis on the words to make it clear he means Sebastian _specifically_.

 _Can I shoot out a tigers vocal chords with a SVD Dragunov. Please. Specify the stripe you want the exit wound in._ “Weren’t you just talking about needing a new rug?”

Jim grins.

\---------------

“Close,” John murmurs to Sebastian. His lips barely move. “Next hall over, five or six doors up, on our right.”

Sebastian’s finding it easier to walk – whatever was affecting him wearing off, or maybe he’s just getting used to the pain. Hell, maybe he just wants to see Jim that little bit faster. He straightens away from John, until he’s nearly walking under his own power.

John lets him go tentatively, trailing his fingers over Seb’s chest.

“I am sorry,” John says, “Really, I am.”

Seb grunts non-committedly. He lets four steps go in silence before he grudgingly adds, “I can’t imagine doing what you do, though.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, you don’t fuck him. You can’t even admit you’re devoted to the guy.”

With long-suffering frustration, John says – “Sherlock is my. Best friend. And that’s all.”

“That’s what I can’t imagine.” Sebastian licks his lips, watches the steady pace of Sherlock’s worn-down heels. He collects his thoughts carefully; unable to stop himself from wondering, _what would you do, Boss? Would you help him? Or shove them further apart?_

He can’t decide which Jim would find funnier: Sherlock and John coexisting in a state of furious no-homo forever; or John admitting his boner for Sherlock with a bouncy baby brat on the way.

_Jim always did hate happy families._

“I’m maybe an inch or two more in touch with my feelings than you are. I never went in for that weepy shit, and obviously neither did you. If I couldn’t touch him – if he couldn’t touch me – we’d never talk at all. It’d be – _did you buy milk? Who’m I killing tonight? Went round the shop today –_ fucking inane bullshit to avoid saying anything meaningful.”

Seb can tell that one hits home.

“But…?” John says finally.

“But,” Sebastian grins. _Game set match._ “ _But._ You don’t have to use words. What’s he going to hide with your cock in his ass? We can just… say it with how we are. Without that I’d go fucking insane. Like you are – not fucking knowing what he’s thinking, not being able to touch him – always being that fucking step removed – I’d fucking kill myself. Or him. Either way.”

“…Good thing I’m not like you then, isn’t it?”

“I thought we already established, Watson, I think we’re pretty fucking similar.”

\---------------

In the mornings Jim always curls lazily inwards, until he’s curved like Yin around Moran. His limbs are loose and lazy, absolutely without tension. He sleeps – _when_ he sleeps – like a cloth doll, almost boneless in his complete relaxation.

Sebastian adores Jim like this with a sort of fierce possessive pride. No one else has watched over Jim Moriarty’s sleep since he was a child; no one but Seb. It was one of those small precious things that no one else knew about Jim, the things Sebastian used to go over and over in his head after Reichenbach until they were rubbed smooth and shiny as pearls.

“Give me a minute,” Sherringford murmurs in Jim’s ear. Sebastian feels warmth drain from him, starting at the top of his scalp and seeping downwards until he is head-to-toe ice. Jim allows Sherringford to disentangle reluctantly ( _aloof as hell when he’s awake but catch him asleep and he’ll half-throttle you, cuddling)._ He murmurs something back, thick and almost indecipherable ( _his accent is worse when he’s just waking up; in the mornings before coffee he talks so broad it has to be translated)_. “Don’t worry,” Sherringford reassures Jim, “I’ll be _right_ back.” ( _He won’t show humanity, he won’t ever say that he needs you, and if he does better pray to God he forgets afterwards)._

Two thoughts war for dominance in Sebastian’s brain.

One. He is absolutely, beyond any question of a doubt, going to have Sherringford’s head on a pike.

And two, it’ll only _half_ be because Sherringford touched Jim. Whatever he’s done, Sebastian can trust Jim to take appropriate revenge; but Sebastian is _damned_ if he’s going to let anyone survive who’s seen Jim like this.

Boneless, soft, drowsy Jim when he’s more than half Richard Brook – this is the Jim that belongs to _Sebastian._ And Sebastian _alone._

\---------------

It’s the hard parts of Sherlock that belong to John. It’s not that no one else can see them (because, obviously…) but they _belong_ to John. John sets the parameters. The limits. John tells Sherlock how large the hard parts of him can grow.

John stands one step behind Sherlock, one step to the left. This is where Sherlock’s conscience lies. _Is this good? A bit not?_ At a crime scene, in the dark, when the caution tape almost seems to glow – Sherlock says, “ _I’d have killed the baby first,”_ and he feels John’s knuckles brush the back of his hand. Like a perimeter warning. _These are the places you’d rather not go._

It is only _after_ that Sherlock begins to wonder what parts of John belong to him. _Before,_ of course, it had been simple; all of John was his. Heart. Soul. Ugly jumpers.

 _After,_ of course, there is Mary. At first Sherlock doesn’t realize how much he’s lost, because it’s not really his area. He’s not stupid – he knows John isn’t in the flat. _Obviously._ Baker Street echoes with the loss of John’s presence. Sherlock stands in the living room and shoots bullets up into John’s bedroom, tracing out where the shape of John should lie. Mrs. Hudson never complains. The point is, it’s not the physical space that matters. It’s the way Mary slowly takes over parts of John that used to be exclusively Sherlock’s. The way John takes absurdly long showers belongs to Mary, now. The chicken-pick of his fingers on the laptop keys belongs to Mary.

 _What is there left for me?_ Sherlock thinks, watching them over the rim of his mug. They’re over at Baker Street again – he had to say, _you’re always welcome here_ , and he’d felt like Mycroft. Plasticine smile. Dead inside.

The odd thing is, the further Sherlock feels himself list from the center of John’s world, the more John stabilizes in the forefront of Sherlock’s concerns. Like simultaneous orbits. He wants to sit John down and tell him (offhand and a little too casual), _you own all of me; I thought you might like to know._ The moment never seems right, though, and each day that passes, his orbit flies further from John’s. Leaving John with Mary, Sherlock alone.

_I used to be your whole world. You wanted me so badly it killed you inside._

_I don’t want you dead but I loved you dying – is that a bit not good?_

_You would know._

\---------------

“Bu _uuuuusy._ ”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes, darling, I am. I do have a life, you know. Comeback to make. World to rule…” There’s not quite enough noise on the other side for Sherlock to figure out exactly what Jim’s doing. Close enough as makes no difference, though; machinery, wind flow. Seagulls. He’s on the roof of one of the warehouses by the sea.

_He could be here in a couple hours if he left now._

“I don’t have time for this. Quickly now; am I fucking you tonight or not.”

“Don’t be _snippy._ ” There’s a silence, and then a gunshot – loud even over the phone line. “I suppose I could make some time if you’re _so_ desperate.” He sighs. “But it _is_ going out of my way, and Sherlock…”

“Yes?”

“You should know by now, I don’t do that for _free.”_

Sherlock feels his face go hot. _Jim in bed with a grudge and an endless imagination, focused on making me pay –_ “I’m aware,” he snaps back brusquely. On the other side of the line, Jim laughs.

“See you tonight, sexy,” he breathes, and hangs up.

Sherlock takes the phone away from his ear and stares at it. He tries to predict what Jim will do to him, but all he can think of is a blank white buzzing; anticipation and nervousness and a sharp edge of fear. He swallows hard.

At least he’s not thinking about John.

\---------------

Several things happen in machine-gun quick succession; John perceives them all in disturbing detail, as if the importance of actions is suddenly tied to his visual cortex.

Sherringford, with his trademark smooth, snakelike motion, unfolds himself from the bed. Jim curls into the warm spot left by his absence, fingers twitching. He makes a face in his sleep, ducking his head to stop hair from tickling his nose. Sebastian _rumbles_ – in the hollow of his chest, the low thrumming growl of a dog in a fight. Sherringford raises a hand, calling the attention of the camera, makes a fist, and pumps it vertically twice – a quick C.R.E. motion that looks out of place in civilian hands. _Hurry up._

Sebastian throws himself forward with a wordless, animal howl that raises the hairs on the back of John’s neck.

He gets his hands around Sherringford’s throat with an expression of twisted satisfaction that makes John’s stomach lurch. Sebastian looks feral; all higher cognitive function lost to fury. Sherringford’s face turns red, then purple, and he claws at Sebastian’s hands futilely. John’s breath catches in his tightening throat as if in sympathy.

John knows he should stop Sebastian. After all, this is _murder_ –

Sherlock is silent at John’s shoulder. In the bed, Jim shifts restlessly, missing the body heat next to him. Sherringford’s knees fold as oxygen loss stops him from holding himself upright, but Sebastian’s strength keeps him in the air. If there was a time to cry hold – it’s now.

John considers himself a good man, most of the time. _Even if, God help me, I think he deserves to die –_

“Stop!”

\---------------

Jim arrives at Baker Street at seven forty-five. He looks around the living room when Sherlock lets him in, wide-eyed, mocking astonishment.

“You haven’t changed a _thing._ Well, except you lost your pet doggy. ” Jim looks gleeful. “Who kept it all warm for you while you were dead?”

“I assume the Conduit Street house was maintained by servants,” Sherlock sniffs, deflecting the question.

“Oh, no… I had a house sitter.” Jim strolls into the center of the living room, taking possession of it with sheer presence. Sherlock watches him through narrowed eyes. “I do like how sentimental you are about this place, though, Sherly. I really do.” He turns back to Sherlock. “Is there a reason you needed a fuck bad enough to call me here?”

His black-hole eyes are hollow and devouring. Sherlock feels a chill and lifts his chin to compensate. “No.”

“ _Yes_.” Jim grins, and sing-songs, “You’re _lying_ to me~ Don’t be rash, Sherlock. I’m already going to punish you.”

Sherlock stands by the door, off-balance and horrifyingly vulnerable. He bites the inside of his cheek, saying nothing. Tonight’s the kind of night where Jim runs circles around him; _caring_ is the worst disadvantage in their game. Especially when Jim is physically incapable of being affected by concerns of the heart.

Jim turns a slow circle in the center of the living room, and ends up facing Sherlock. “Strip,” he says calmly, taking a seat in Sherlock’s chair. The motion of his shoulders as he flicks back his suit to sit down is _fascinating._ Sherlock opens his mouth to object, and Jim grins. “You’re already going to be paying for your lip, Sherly, don’t make it worse for yourself.”

Sherlock shuts his mouth with a click of teeth, and puts his fingers to the top button of his shirt. Jim’s eyes half close, following the motion. He’s smiling, the flash of his teeth bright against his lips. Sherlock feels his pulse beat hard in the hollow of his throat; the thump of blood through his veins very shallowly concealed by his skin. Jim must almost be able to _see_ his heartbeat.

_God, that’s enticing._

Sherlock drops his gaze from Jim and follows his own fingers. He sucks his bottom lip in and bites it – less to focus himself and more because if he closes his eyes, the soft wet skin between his teeth could almost be Jim’s. It’s hard not to picture how he must look, stripping, his pale chest being revealed inch by inch to the homicidal maniac sitting in his chair. Sherlock feels like he’s being dissected. It’s like with each button he undoes – with each flash of skin he reveals – Jim’s eyes pierce deeper to his bones. Sherlock fiddles with the buttons on his cuffs for altogether too long, just because it gives him an excuse to keep his head ducked and his face hidden.

It doesn’t help much. There’s no hiding from Jim.

Sherlock takes a shuddering breath, trying to calm himself. _Keep control._ He lets his shirt drop carelessly to the floor with affected coolness. God, if he could just not let Jim see how much the scrutiny is getting to him – but Sherlock’s aware how hopeless that is.

“Trousers,” Jim drawls. Sherlock looks up. Jim has his ankle on his knee, leg folded at such an angle that it conceals whether or not he’s aroused. Sherlock feels a sharp pain in his lip, and realizes he’s bit down harder than he was meaning to. He groans. Jim’s smile gets wider. They both know what’s going on.

_Power play. He has me like this and I can’t even –_

Usually Sherlock puts up more of a fight but tonight he’s aching to lose. He strips his trousers, his pants without waiting to be asked, and stands naked in front of Jim. The tip of his erection brushes against his stomach. The floor is cold beneath his feet. Sherlock wiggles his toes, feeling awkward and bare. His hands clench at his sides as he wills himself to stillness and silence.

Jim’s polished shoe taps against air over his knee. His eyes are flooded black, all the way to the rim of the iris. Some days Sherlock can’t tell if they’re just naturally like that. He licks his lips, running his gaze down Sherlock – Sherlock feels a tremble over his skin in the wake of Jim’s attention like it’s a physical touch.

“Kneel.”

Moriarty’s voice is rougher, now. Craving. Sherlock falls to his knees with something like relief, not bothering to make the motion graceful. The shock of the hard wood against his bones makes him take a sharp breath in, loud in the stillness. It drives some of the mud from his thoughts, allowing him a moment of clarity. Jim shifts in his chair, given away by a rustle and creak as he seeks a more comfortable position. Sherlock glances upwards – _damn._ His line of sight is still blocked by Jim’s crossed leg, and judging from the small grin on Jim’s face, that’s intentional. Sherlock’s eyes narrow, calculating. Jim tuts admonishment at him.

“Well, if you’re going to do _that_ you’ll have to shut your eyes.”

Sherlock can’t help himself. “Why?”

“Because I told you to, Sherly, and you _really_ want to please me tonight. No deducing.”

Sherlock huffs, but he shuts his eyes anyways. Another creak as Jim stands, then his shoes tap over the floorboards towards Sherlock. He paces a wide circle around where Sherlock is kneeling, and Sherlock feels prickles between his shoulder blades at the attention.

“Shall I guess?” Jim asks, “Say hot or cold. _Is it John?_ ” Sherlock grits his teeth. “No?” Jim laughs. “Well… If that’s how you want it. The truth is your safe word, Sherly. Tell me why you’re so desperate, if you want me to stop.”

_Stop what?_

Sherlock fights the urge to open his eyes. Jim’s footsteps continue to the mantle, and Sherlock runs through a quick list of everything he’s left there; trying to figure out the game before it starts. _Skull, books – candles – picture frame –_

_Riding crop._

Sherlock inhales, swelling his lungs, the rush of air over his lips making a soft sound in the silence. Jim laughs to himself, quiet and delighted. “Ah, you’ve got it, haven’t you? That _is_ why I like you.” The crop taps against his leg, and then once – gentle as a kiss – between Sherlock’s shoulder blades. Sherlock shifts his weight from one knee to the other, hating himself for how his skin starts to tingle.

Jim waits a beat. Sherlock can’t trust himself to say anything. The floorboards creak as Jim finds a comfortable position behind him, and then the world is still – as if the whole flat has its breath caught in anticipation, as if not even the street outside dares to make noise.

The first blow stings like electricity, flat over the small of Sherlock’s back. He arcs with it, drawing himself up in instinctive response so his cock brushes against his stomach. After the sharp initial crack of pain, his nerves sing reverb like a tuning fork. His skin must be flushing. Jim hums, pleased.

The second blow flicks upwards at the end like a question, at an angle to the first. Now that Sherlock’s braced for the pain, it seems sharper. His vision flashes white as a thin hot line of pain blooms over his skin, and – without a pause – the third blow bisects the second, on the backhand, Jim’s quickening breath audible over the whistle and snap of the crop.

A fourth blow. A fifth. It’s without end. They’re getting harder, faster, each stripe on Sherlock’s back lit up in pure white light in his mind.

It must be on the tenth blow that Sherlock lurches forward, unable to help the way his body cringes away from the pain. He’s drawn blood, digging his fingernails into his palms to stay silent.

Jim grabs a handful of hair and yanks him back upright. “Naughty naughty,” he hisses, into Sherlock’s ear, “Can’t you even stay still?” Humiliation burns a hole in Sherlock’s stomach, but his cock can’t seem to tell the difference between that and the heat of arousal. He’s getting harder – precum drawing a slick line on his stomach, cool against the heat of his skin.

“Let’s try that again,” Jim purrs, giving Sherlock’s head a shake. “You stay ab-so-lute-ly still, Sherly, or I’ll tie you up and leave you for Johnny to find.”

Sherlock groans.

“You’d like that?” Jim sounds amused. “Why don’t we? Show the good little doctor what a whore you are.”

_John comes home and finds me tied up, blindfolded, back raw, cock dripping – oh god, would he take me, without waiting, without **questioning** – _

Sherlock drowns in the fantasy, even though the cool logical part of his mind says it’s ridiculous. He almost doesn’t notice Jim letting go of his hair. He _does_ , however, notice the blow on his shoulders. It’s much harder than the others. There’s going to be a welt, this time. The force of it, catching Sherlock unawares, knocks him over – his cheek presses hard against the floor as he falls too fast to catch himself on his hands.

He starts to shove himself upright and Jim says, lightly, “Stop.” The word might as well be iron chains. Sherlock freezes. Jim traces a cool finger down his spine; like ice against the heat of his abused back. “Stay where you are,” Jim continues, easy and casual. “I like this position for you.”

Then Jim’s presence disappears as he steps back. Sherlock sets his fists against the floor, either side of his face, and waits. Sure enough, the crop whistles through the air and licks a stripe across Sherlock’s ass. Sherlock cries out, but Jim doesn’t pause – another blow lands, and another, until Sherlock is a screaming mess of nerve endings. He can’t even count how many times Jim strikes him – his skin is raw, ruined, and it wouldn’t surprise him to feel the trickle of blood down his inner thigh.

It hasn’t stopped Sherlock from getting painfully hard, though. He jerks with each blow against the floor, and his cock bobs against his stomach – sliding against the precum already smeared there. It’s just enough sensation to feel hopelessly good against the pain of the crop.

After what seems like hours, there’s a pause. Sherlock’s face is wet with tears, pressed hard against the floor. Jim is breathing heavily above him.

“Aren’t you a sight,” Jim purrs.

 _Flat on my face with my ass in the air, how typical –_ Which is as far as Sherlock gets before Jim presses a finger into him, _dry_. After an eternity of pain, the sudden shock of pleasure explodes over Sherlock’s ruined mind like a grenade.

 _Oh, god._ That might have been a whimper, that sound he just made. Jim’s clever fingers press in for his prostate without waiting, without wasting time. Sherlock’s weight presses his face painfully against the floor, but moving isn’t an option. Not when Jim’s fingers are fucking him with such neat, cold precision. Not when Jim’s giving Sherlock exactly what Sherlock needs to get off. The pleasure is overwhelming, and it’s _merciless._ Jim is still dressed, still untouched, and Sherlock knows he’s making Sherlock moan just for the humiliation of it.

_Taking me apart just to prove how easy it is, oh God –_

Sherlock half wishes he could shove Jim out of the flat now, but he can’t. He _needs_ Jim. And it kills him. Jim works a second finger in, still no lube, and Sherlock thinks he might split in half; but the pain’s as good as the pleasure, and his mind is whiting out with both of them combined. Morals, games – what does it matter? – he just _needs._

“Come on, Sherlock,” Jim murmurs, horribly amused, fingers pounding against Sherlock’s prostate, “Show me just how little control you have. Can’t even take my fingers… Poor, weak little detective…”

Sherlock shudders, willing himself not to moan and failing. Jim’s fingers twist and curl, rubbing over the bundle of nerves inside him, and his frayed self-control stretches to the breaking point. He claws to hold on – surely he can last at least until Jim is fucking him, it’s only fingers, it can’t – Jim can’t make him –

But Jim can.

With a cry of pure, self-loathing abandon, Sherlock spends himself over the floor and collapses – shuddering – forward. He’s dimly aware of Jim pulling his fingers out and straightening, then the tap of Jim’s shoes as he makes his way around to Sherlock’s head.

Unkind fingers wrap in Sherlock’s hair, pull him upwards.

“Wanted to prove,” Jim smiles at him, ice-cold and cruel, “Just how _boring_ you are. If you’ll excuse me, I have to pay my house-sitter.” He drops Sherlock’s head back to the floor.

And _leaves_ Sherlock there.

\---------------

Jim calls when Seb’s on a job. Of _course._

He’s got the rifle to his shoulder, ready to make the shot, and his phone goes off – the ringtone reserved for _important_ , for _pick-up-or-I-skin-you._ He abandons the mark, goes scrambling over to his bag.

“Hello?”

“Only you, Tiger.”

“What?” Sebastian blinks, rapidly running through a list of the jobs that Jim had told him had to be completed personally. “Boss, I don’t – “

“I know you don’t. Finish up and come home. I’m waiting.”

Sebastian never kills that target. Her lucky day, he supposes. He packs up without firing and heads straight home, because he’s learned not to question the rare times when Jim needs him.

Jim’s so changeable, after all.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m going to have everything,” Jim says. "You don’t know how awful that is. Winning. It’s just…” he makes a straight-trajectory gesture with his hand. Always forward. Nothing changing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be honest this chapter is a bit of a holding pattern - the next one should be the grand finale! Hopefully I'll be able to tie everything off within one chapter, but it might stretch into two. Who knows. Anyways. The scene should be set now, at least!

At John’s shout, Sebastian hesitates. Just a breath. Just a hair.

Even still, the tiny pause is enough to allow Sherringford a sucking gasp of air. Sebastian realizes it, snarls, and tightens his grip again. He’s too late to complete Sherringford’s murder. The hand sign Sherringford made at the camera pays off in record time. John stumbles aside as a stream of black swathed guardsmen pour through the door; three, four – six of them, at least.

The first one reaches Sebastian, and John can see their struggle between gaps in hurrying black fabric; like he’s watching the neighbours fight through the curtains. Sebastian curses, throws an elbow back without breaking his grip, and sends the guardsman to the floor.

John can see the darker than black patch on the man’s mask, where blood starts to soak through. His sunglasses have broken inwards, driving shards of dark plastic into his eye sockets. The creases at the corners of his eyes are bisected by cuts, red lines in what’s visible of his tanned face. He cries out in shock, the sound lost in Sebastian’s shouted curses.

_Funny - I’d forgotten they were people at all –_

The second guardsman reaches Sebastian, throws himself forward. This time Sebastian doesn’t have enough of an angle to toss him off immediately, and the third is able to break Sebastian’s grip on Sherringford’s throat. Sherringford goes stumbling backwards, gulping for air, and Sebastian is overwhelmed by the swarm. John can only see him in flashes; the twist of his spine or the arc of his fist as he writhes and struggles against them. But soon there’s a guardsman on each of Sebastian’s arms, and another throwing tight boxer’s punches into his ribs. He jerks, held into the blows by men on either side of him. Each time a fist lands in his gut, he grunts – the puff of air being driven from his lungs, getting weaker with each impact.

 _This isn’t what I –_ John takes a step forward.

“ _Don’t,_ ” comes the hissing voice at his side. Sherlock grabs John’s arm and gives him a significant look.

John opens his mouth to protest. Sherlock raises his eyebrows, as if to say, _Is Moran worth dying for?_ The scuffle in front of them continues, but John sighs and allows Sherlock to pull him to the side.

Sebastian gets in one good kick to the stomach of the man punching him, before a blow to the head puts him under. The guards drag him – heels scraping gouges in the dirt on the floor – out the doorway. John gets a glimpse of his face as they go by; pale, slack, and bleeding.

Sherringford coughs, hacking oxygen back into his lungs. “Sorry about that,” he manages finally, flailing a hand at Sherlock.

“Oh, no, take your time,” Sherlock purrs back.

Jim sleeps on in his drug-induced haze, showing no sign of ever knowing Sebastian was there.

\---------------

Sebastian comes awake as they’re dragging him out of the bunker.

_No – no – I have to save Jim –_

The first warning the men holding him have that Sebastian’s awake is when he rips himself free of their grip and throws himself back down the hallway. They tackle him, wrestle him to the ground, grind his face into the concrete. He spits out dirt and bone dust.

He doesn’t bother to swear or yell. Not anymore. All his energy has to go into fighting them. Sebastian makes them pay in blood and bone for every inch they drag him forward. He’s unarmed, exhausted, _wounded_ , and he hasn’t eaten in days. Sebastian feels like a limp rag, wrung out and hung up to suffer.

And in the end, there are simply too many of them; an endless series of hands that beat Sebastian down to the floor and scrape him towards the exit. By the time the guards are done, his body is nothing but pulp. They mash Sebastian into hamburger and he leaves a trail of blood and spit up to the outside world.

To add insult to injury, before they dump him in a ditch, they crack a hammer on the back of his skull.

\---------------

Sherringford leans over the bed to grab his clothes. He’s still hacking to clear his throat, his wheezing breaths the only sound in the room after the violence of Sebastian’s passage. John stares at the space in the doorway where Sebastian had disappeared, dragged out by a miasma of black-swathed guardsmen. He feels like the after-images are still imprinted on his eyes.

_Should I have helped him? Even being who he was?_

Sherlock is fixed on Sherringford. When John glances to check his expression, Sherlock’s lips are pressed together so firmly they’ve gone white and almost disappeared.

Sherringford dresses himself casually, working around the limp figure of Moriarty in bed behind him. John shouldn’t feel a tiny prick of satisfaction at Moriarty like that. But – oh, hell. As much as Sebastian Moran proved to be not a complete waste of space, _Jim Moriarty_ was a whole different kettle of fish. Psychopath. Mass-Murderer.

_Still –_

_He thought Sherringford arranged everything to get to Sherlock, how wrong he was, I can still hear the **scream** when he saw Sebastian – _John grits his teeth. _I do **not** feel sympathetic,_ he tells himself firmly. _I draw the line at sympathy for **Moriarty.**_

“Have breakfast with me, will you?” Sherringford asks smoothly. He’s already stepping by them to the door, fully dressed, his leather jacket folded over his arm. Sherlock says nothing, watching him through narrowed eyes. Sherringford smiles, and turns to John. His eyes trace a slimy path from John’s face to his shoes, lingering and horribly intimate. John straightens his shoulders. He can feel Sherlock tremble furiously at his side and knows the cloying stare is meant as provocation.

“Unless you’d rather have a go at Jim,” Sherringford continues, glancing up to Sherlock as if the long once-over hadn’t happened. “He should be… _pliable_ , still.”

Sherlock freezes. Sherringford smiles. They exchange one of those Holmes-brother-looks that drive John wild; saying a hundred things with – oh, god knows, Morse code and their eyelashes.

_Probably because Sherlock and Jim – well, apparently –_

**_He isn’t completely untouchable, Johnny –boy._** It’s only a memory, but John still shakes his head, trying to get Jim loose.

“ _No_ ,” Sherlock snaps, “ _Thank_ you.”

Sherringford shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

He slithers out the door ahead of them. John takes a step to follow but he pulls up short when he realizes that Sherlock hasn’t moved at all. Instead, Sherlock stares at Jim on the hard, lonely bed. His lips press thin together and his eyes narrow in calculation, watching the rise and fall of Jim’s ribs.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock’s stare breaks away.to John. His brow furrows, under his messy fringe of unwashed hair. “You trust me. Completely.”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

There’s a smudge of dirt on Sherlock’s cheekbone just under his eye. John thinks Sherlock looks almost _sad_ , as they stare at each other, but then – he can’t exactly tell. The expression is gone before he can grasp it completely, and the light is uncertain. He might have mistaken…

“You must be very careful, here, John. Sherringford isn’t like Mycroft or I. He won’t care what gets broken during his games.” Sherlock’s voice is low and careful like he’s making sure to put meaning into every syllable.

John doesn’t know what to do but follow when Sherlock sweeps out the door.

\---------------

Sebastian wakes up in a ditch.

It’s raining. He hates the rain. After that awful winter, the one before Jim, Sebastian felt the rain soak through his skin to his muscles, making them into mush and nothing.

He tries to struggle upwards, loses traction, and falls back down again. The mud of the ditch welcomes him like an old friend. It coats his hands, his joints, his throat; slimy and dripping.

Sebastian’s head spins. The ditch is filling with water; the grated gutter that rain is supposed to flow into has been clogged with newspaper. Sebastian tries to haul himself out of it again, slips, and falls back down. He’s covered in blood and mud, panting and snarling.

_I hate London. I hate the UK. Every inch of it. It’s still a miserable rainy place, with awful food and meaningless people, and it has the **Holmes.**_

Maybe he’ll take Jim away, when this is over. They could go to Kandahar. Laos. Some sort of warzone, where it’s hot and desperate. Back to Myanmar, even, where they’d spend that first weekend hunting tigers. Back to when Jim used to kiss him thoughtlessly, pure and wild and untouchable like electricity contained in skin. Sometimes, under the dreary gray of England’s skies, Sebastian thinks it would all have been better if they’d just stayed in Myanmar; making slow lazy love in the hotel, leaving the sheets stained in blood and laughter.

_Jim would have been bored in a week._

Sebastian pushes himself up a third time. This time when he falls, it’s on his face. The thick mixed paste of blood and muck clogs his nostrils, chokes the breath from him. Sebastian is drowning.

He can’t stop thinking. Can’t stop remembering.

_“I’m going to have everything,” Jim says underneath the mosquito netting, one hand carding through the tiger skin Sebastian laid at his feet. He blows smoke out through his nostrils, rolling his cigarette restlessly between finger and thumb. “You don’t know how awful that is. Winning. It’s just…” he makes a straight-trajectory gesture with his hand. Always forward. Nothing changing._

Sebastian claws the sludge from his face. He sets his heels firmly in the bottom of the ditch, and shoves his useless body out on his back, using his legs as leverage. He has to scrape himself over a foot of gravel and mixed rock by the roadside before he can hit solid concrete. Rain stings into his raw skin, ice-cold and merciless. By the time he collapses onto the road, his muscles are screaming complaint. His ribs ache with the warning throb of bruises; even his tendons burn, over-used and acidic with exhaustion. Sebastian grits his teeth. He deals with it.

_Jim turns to Sebastian, smiling, rolling his eyes. “Listen to me, complaining. You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?”_

_“Um.”_

_The crickets are loud in Myanmar. Louder than they ever were in England. The stars are brighter, too. After so long in the muck and fog, Sebastian wants the warmth to stay in his blood forever. He lounges on the couch with his hand behind his head, eyes shut so he can breathe in the smell of the tropics more deeply. He breathes it back out through his nose in a huff._

_Seb can’t think of an answer, although Jim’s question was probably rhetorical. He drifts in the welcoming darkness behind his eyelids until, without warning, a single cool finger presses into his forehead._

_It’s the first time Jim has ever touched him. The electric charge in Jim’s skin jolts over Sebastian, grounded by that tiny bit of contact._

Shoving himself off the pavement doesn’t seem possible until he’s already halfway through his knees. It’s not a question of _possible,_ anymore. Sebastian damns himself to stop. Jim needs him. Nothing else matters.

_Sebastian’s eyes snap open. Jim is leaning over him, his forefinger square between Sebastian’s eyes, where the chakra for inner sight should be unlocked._

_“Stop thinking,” Jim says. His tone is warning, but he smiles anyways. “I didn’t hire you to **think.** Don’t ever try to fix me, Moran, you’re not smart enough.” Sebastian never argues with that._

Six years later and he’s still not smart enough to fix Jim. Still not smart enough to save Jim. He limps along the street; four steps forward, one on his knees. He feels like he can barely breathe. Each intake of air is marked with stabbing pain in his right side, under his ribs. _Bad,_ Sebastian thinks, as he scrapes off another layer of skin falling to his knees, _sounds like fluid when I breathe. Getting weaker._

Sebastian shoves himself up again. Still not smart enough to come up with a plan. Still unarmed. Still injured, still broken. _I’ll crawl if I have to._

He may have too. All he manages before he falls the next time is two steps, drunken and wandering like he’s going home from a bar.

**_Come on, Moran. Let’s go hunt tigers._ **

But Jim is waiting.

Sebastian curses himself back to his feet.

\---------------

Sherringford has three teacups set out and waiting on the bare steel table of the interrogation room. Steam rises from them slowly, like ghosts.

He settles behind the table, and gestures Sherlock to take the only other chair.

“I prefer to stand,” Sherlock tells him.

“Let your pet take it, then.”

Sherlock looks to John. John shakes his head, and Sherlock says, “We’re fine, _thank_ you.”

“You’re not still upset over the cocaine, are you Sherlock?” Sherringford grins, amused at his own private joke. John feels an ugly wrench of anger surge through him, and clenches his fists. “Oh, don’t be like that. It was what – twenty years ago? Twenty five? Water under the bridge.”

“I felt the effects much longer than that,” Sherlock raises his chin, delivering the line with frosty condescension. Sherringford’s grin gets wider. He reaches forward, picking up his tea with slender graceful fingers that remind John far too much of Sherlock.

“You don’t know the story, do you, Johnny.” Switching tactics, Sherringford glances at John before taking a sip of his tea. John feels himself moved into place, a pawn in their chess game. He’s uncomfortably reminded of the pool, of Jim’s breath hot on his ear and the bomb strapped to his chest.

He refuses to ask what story. Sherringford sighs.

“You slip your younger brother _one packet_ of cocaine, he can’t handle it, and you _never_ hear the end of it…”

The words drip down John’s spine like melting ice. “It was you.”

“Of _course_ it was me. What else does a seventeen year old runaway give his poor, bullied little brother as a going-away present?”

“Wait – you’re not – “ John turns to Sherlock. “He’s joking.”

Sherlock’s face has gone pale. “John, don’t.”

Sherringford practically crows in amusement. “What, you didn’t know at all? How did you _think_ he got started bouncing around drug-dens in Europe? And oh my, wasn’t Berlin a time…”

“Shut _up._ ”

Sherringford raises his eyebrows, mock insulted, and takes a sip of tea over the rim of his mug. His colour-less shark’s eyes glint in amusement. Sherlock looks pained.

“John – “

There’s something hot and violent in John’s chest, ripping at him, trying to get free. He pictures a young Sherlock – lost, hopeless, shaking fingers reaching out to a packet of drugs on his bedside table because he has nothing else to dull the edge of boredom–

“No! I refuse to believe that you’re a drug addict because this – this utter failure of a human being –“

“Oh _God,_ John,” Sherringford interrupts, still horribly amused. “Don’t be so dramatic. You wouldn’t understand how it is. I wanted to play. Sherlock was an open target. He’d be disappointed with me if I _hadn’t_.”

_I was a soldier. I killed people. I’d kill him._

_Maybe Sebastian’s right. Maybe we’re more similar than I thought._

John certainly wishes he could do what Sebastian had, wrap his hands around Sherringford’s throat and choke the spiteful life from him. Sherlock is pale and silent at John’s side like a ghost. It’s not hard to imagine him being lost and weak. It’s not hard to imagine Sherringford taking advantage.

John practically vibrates where he stands, fists clenched, furious.

“Sherlock’s always appreciated a good villain, after all,” Sherringford continues, setting his teacup on the table with a neat little _tink_.

John takes an abortive step towards the steel table. “You can’t just – this is. _Insane._ You just admitted to giving him _cocaine_ when he was barely a _child._ ”

“Old enough to enjoy it, wasne he?”

\---------------

Sherlock freezes.

He presses himself back behind the kitchen wall. There’s murmuring in the living room. The soft sound of Mary’s jeans falling to the floor makes Sherlock clench his fist in what he recognizes is _John’s_ habit; not his own.

Mary moans. There’s a low, deep chuckle that must be John – although Sherlock has never heard him sound quite like this before.

 _This is when I’m supposed to leave,_ Sherlock tells himself. _Any sane man would go._

But he doesn’t.

“Take off your panties,” John commands, soft, almost breathless.

Mary laughs, softly, then there’s the pressing sound of a kiss. “But Sherlock…”

“ _Damn_ Sherlock.”

Licking, sucking sounds follow; the slick movement of a mouth over skin, and Sherlock finds himself biting his lip. _What if it’s John’s mouth making those noises? Sweet, reliable John, with his mouth on my – **her** –_

Sherlock has to see. He just _has_ to. It’s no longer negotiable. He _can’t_ see. John would never forgive him. He hesitates where he is, paralyzed. He runs through his options – coming up hard and fast on _Jim._

_But ah, there was the painful humiliation of that last time…_

Lit by half-light of the kitchen stove, Sherlock’s lips twist in a soundless snarl. Mary moans again, rougher, deeper. Losing herself in whatever John’s doing.

_I can’t stay here. I can’t go to Jim._

There’s a number Sherlock never deletes, even when he thinks he’ll never use it again. He slips to the door of the flat and out, onto the blackness of the stairs, into the night where it’s crisp and dark and clear. His breath steams out against the stars, like hot vapour off the surface of tea.

His fingers fumble on the keys in the cold, but he doesn’t misdial. The call’s picked up on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“I need a hit.”

\---------------

The kitchen’s clean when Sebastian comes home from his latest hit, but he can _smell_ her perfume on the air. Just like that, whatever good mood he had from a job well done is gone. Jim looks up from his phone on the kitchen counter, does his scan of Sebastian, and looks back down.

“Jesus, Jim, you brought her _here_?”

_Our **house,** Jim. _

_Sleepy mornings with the sun breaking through your soft cotton curtains, late nights stale with the taste of scotch and cigarettes, the upstairs bathroom that still smells of whatever you exploded in the bathtub and no one, **no one** , has ever been here but you and me – _

“Yes, well, I’m dating her. It’d be _weird_ if I didn’t bring her home.”

“You’re dating Molly Hooper.”

“Yes.”

“Molly fucking _Hooper._ ”

Jim looks up, raises his eyebrows at Sebastian. That look usually means trouble, but Sebastian can’t bring himself to care. “Are you being stupid on purpose, or do you think it’s cute?”

“Are you sleeping with her?” Sebastian challenges Jim, dropping his bag by the door with an unnecessarily loud _thud._ He wants to pick Jim up and slam him up against something fragile.

“You know, I should _tell_ you. It’d serve you right. But it’s really very rude to ask who I’m sleeping with, isn’t it Tiger?”

“I thought we were – “

“You thought we were what? Oh, darling. Were you in love?”

The words punch Sebastian’s stomach like sledgehammer blows. He stares at Jim for a soundless beat; letting himself drown in Jim’s expressionless eyes. Then, without another word, he turns on his heel and walks out.

Jim knows he’s in love, of course.

There’s no hiding from Jim.

\---------------

“Old enough to – “

“Well, let’s see. Maybe I’m not being fair. I mean, I was seventeen – give or take, carry the one… What were you, Sherlock?” Sherringford blinks innocently at Sherlock, as if he really didn’t know.

Sherlock is completely colourless. He looks like he’d pass out, if sheer force of will wasn’t keeping him upright.

“Eleven.” He admits. Quiet. Lost.

John hears a rush in his ears like a helicopter blowing in off the desert. Loud pounding that must be his heart rate. The buzzing of a thousand nerves of adrenaline, all firing at once.

_He was a **child.**_

The next thing John knows, there’s tea spattered over featureless steel, a teacup crashing to the floor in a spray of hot liquid. John’s got his hand wrapped tight in the collar of Sherringford’s hooded sweatshirt, hauling him forward across the table. He barely hears Sherlock’s shout. He raises his fist.

John’s not thinking clearly, but if he was, the thought on his mind would be, _I’m going to break that smile out of Sherringford’s smug little face, tooth by tooth._

\---------------


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have a cover! [[link]](http://goingbadly.tumblr.com/post/80936033589/separation-author-goingbadly-summary-two)
> 
> Hello and welcome to the last chapter of Separation!
> 
> My thanks to Miescha and NailBunny, without whom, blah blah blah. Mie, you know I couldn't lift a finger without you. NailBunny, thanks for the prompt that got this all started.
> 
> Friendly reminder about the gore warning! It hasn't come into play so far but it will this chapter.   
> If you're not familiar with the difference between FMJ/standard rounds points vs. Hollow points take a look at [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v92Sj4XVKNw) (completely SFW trigger warning: MELONDESTRUCTION)

John will always feel bad about Mary. _For_ Mary. Something.

He knows it before he marries her. He knows it shaving his face in the bathroom mirror, already dreaming about the adventures he’ll have with Sherlock Holmes. John is not an unfaithful man; but his dreams, _oh,_ his dreams are unfaithful. As soon as he lets his hold on awareness go – as soon as he drifts down in the uncivilized space of his subconscious thought – Sherlock is waiting.

John curls in bed beside her, his arm wrapped around the smallest point of her waist. He can feel Sherlock tingle in the back of his mind; pacing the corners out of John’s conscious control, sharing space with animal instincts.

John, being a reasonable man, _hates_ it. Mary is perfect. Everything he ever wanted. Clever. Sharp. Soft on the corners, but steel in her bones. And she is _pregnant with his child,_ for God’s sake. Loving her is rational; it makes quantifiable sense. John can add up precisely all the reasons why she is everything he could ever dream of in a spouse. During the days, he never thinks about leaving.

But he doesn’t dream of her. And in the night, when his force of will has been drained by exhaustion, he shuts his eyes and gives in to wanting Sherlock.

\---------------

John’s fist hits Sherringford’s face and Sherringford slumps backwards in his chair like a bag of rice with the corner cut; all tension and mass draining slowly out of him. He looks smaller. Less threatening. John pants over him, fists still clenched so tight his fingernails cut his palms.

_Animal instinct._ John nearly trembles with the force of it. _Rip. Destroy. Kill. Take him apart, he hurt Sherlock –_ Sherringford, recovering, raises a hand to gesture at the cameras and John punches him again. Harder. Into and _through_ his temple, sending him freefalling into unconsciousness.

Sherringford sprawls backwards in the chair. Somewhere in John’s back-brain the animal part of him – made out of suppressed lusts and rages – screams triumph. He wants to punch Sherringford again with cave-mannish glee. He wants to beat Sherringford’s face concave.

John raises his fist to do just that, but before he can murder Sherringford with his bare hands Sherlock intervenes. His palm curls around John’s shoulders and spins him, away from the violence, away from the bestial urge in John’s heart.

“John. _John._ Are you all right?” Sherlock’s eyes are wide and reddened. Moisture collects against his thin bottom lashes, the footprints left by fear.

John blinks at him, trying to clear the haze of anger from his eyes. “Yeah-yeah, I’m fine. I’m…” he takes a deep breath; lets it out slow, shaking his head to clear it. “Alright. I’m back. Jesus. Are you okay?”

“Me? Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.” Sherlock lets John go, and steps awkwardly away, barely sparing a glance at his brother’s unconscious body. He runs his hands through his curls. He can’t seem to look straight at John. “That, um... thing that you did. John…” Sherlock clears his throat, clasping his hands behind his back – probably to keep them steady. “Why did you…?”

_Mirror image_. This is the swimming pool, all over again. John stares at Sherlock.

Sherlock’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. John could deny it now, he thinks. He could say, _because you’re my best friend,_ and it would all be okay. It would all be normal and unthreatening. They’d never talk about the curve of Sherlock’s back as he kissed Sebastian, and they’d never talk about the frustrated burn that made John painfully hard in the nights at Baker Street.

_I could deny it all, again and again and again._

_God help me._

“Because I… I have always… you’ve always been…” John falters, and grits his teeth; there’s nothing to do but to have out with it. “I love you.”

He tosses the words down defiantly between them. Sherlock blinks, four times in quick succession. “Sorry, I thought you said – ”

“I did.”

“You mean you – ”

“I love you.”

“…What?”

“I always have. With your bloody stupid hair, and your coat, and …dammit, Sherlock. You’ve always been – I mean, as far as I’m concerned – that is – ” John struggles against the words, can’t quite force them out right. _I love you._ _You are the most brilliant thing I have ever seen – you are fantastic – the world is colourless without you._

He can’t say it. He opens his mouth, and shuts it again, and he can’t say _anything._

\---------------

_I know,_ Sherlock wants to tell John. _I’m quite aware. Since the first time you licked your lips and let yourself look me over. But you were never ready to admit it. Oh, god, John. I wanted to force you just to **have** you, but I couldn’t. God, I’ve waited so long for you to stop being stupid – I’ve been entirely patient, all this time, do you know how **bloody** dull you can be in denial –_ He can see John struggle to articulate his thoughts, but the shock’s still setting in. Sherlock says nothing.

“Well… now you know. And there it is.” John clenches his steady fist. Sherlock can see rejection settle in to the dip in his shoulders, making them square off against the pain. “That’s, um, that’s how it is.”

_I love you. That’s how it is._

Something in Sherlock’s heart is singing paens to John’s courage. “Say that again,” he commands.

“That’s …how it is?” John looks confused. Sherlock scowls at him.

“Not that, the bit before that.”

“Um… Now you know, and there it is?”

“No no _no.” Really, is it not obvious?_ “John – say I love you again.”

“What?”

“Say it again, I want to hear it, _hurry up –_ “

“I love you?”

_Yes. Excellent._ John looks confused, his soft mouth slack around the corners as he frowns and tries to puzzle things out. “I should _bloody_ well hope so,” Sherlock tells him, and grabs him.

The worn texture of John’s shirt is uniquely familiar under Sherlock’s fingers, each fibre in the weave soft and beckoning. Sherlock grips tight and pulls. John stumbles into him. The weight and smell of him is evocative of a thousand other moments; cases, reliefs, cups of tea shared in the living-room over half-faded adrenaline.

Sherlock takes a deep breath. John’s eyes are wide, but not scared. The two of them are close enough that Sherlock can feel the way his breath rebounds on John’s lips, puffing back against him in miniscule clouds of PG Tips and gun smoke.

“Again,” Sherlock breathes, forgetting all about Sherringford, because he will never get tired of the moment John admits what he knew all along.

“ _I love you_.”

\--

“Well that really _was_ dumb, wasn’t it?” Sherringford rasps, shattering the moment when John feels Sherlock’s lips seal over his. He uncoils from his chair, and Sherlock jerks towards the door – drawing John, hand in hand, after him.

Sherringford snaps his chin up to crack his neck. The popping of his bones is the ratchet sound of handcuffs closing shut. In John’s hand Sherlock’s fingers twitch. John doesn’t dare to glance up at Sherlock’s face.

“Going to be a real long night for you two now,” Sherringford drawls. John can’t take his eyes away. Even though Sherringford’s looking a little worse for wear, he’s still deadly and John knows it. There’re bruises on his jawline, and temple, and a streak of something white staining the sleeve of his jacket. He draws breath slow, as if hovering on the edge of sleep, and his grey eyes are rimmed red. When they flick to Sherlock, John can see the delicate tracings of veins. “I could have you up for _hours._ ”

Sherlock’s chin rises. “I’m not scared of you,” he says.

“Aren’t you? When did that change?” Sherringford holds out a hand. “Hand over the good doctor, Sherly.” John squeezes Sherlock’s fingers, but Sherlock doesn’t squeeze back.

“No.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Sherringford sighs, “Or it’s bullets through the spine for both of you. I can play just as well with _cripples._ ”

Before Sherlock can argue and risk it John pulls his fingers out of Sherlock’s grip and steps unflinchingly forward. Sherringford grins brilliantly, ear to ear like a Cheshire cat. He lunges, a rusty fold-out knife at John’s gut in one quick motion. Sherringford reaches up and grabs the nape of John’s neck, drawing him in till they’re braced forehead to forehead. John’s stomach clenches at the prick of the knife, and Sherringford’s fingers curl around the sensitive hairs at the top of his spine.

“I’m going to _gut_ you, Doctor Watson,” Sherringford purrs, gloating.

\--

"I think the fuck not."

Sebastian’s voice, like his gun, is steady. Even if he has to grip his ‘borrowed’ Sig Sauer in both hands just to keep it from weaving.

Sherringford freezes. He turns his head, just enough that his profile becomes visible. Between the sights of the Sig Sherringford’s face eclipses John’s; he starts to smile, and light gleams on his canines. Sebastian’s grip tightens around the Sig. One hand grinds into the other around the gun, crushing his own bones downwards. It keeps the muzzle straight, but only just. There’s a thick oil-spill of hate on Sebastian’s brain, radiating out from Sherringford. Restraining himself from shooting instantly isn’t just super-human, it’s fucking _godly._

“I did _wonder_ why my men hadn’t come to rescue me,” Sherringford sighs.

“Shut up,” Sebastian tells him. “You’re only alive because Jim will want to kill you himself.” If Sebastian denied Jim the chance to slowly dismember Sherringford, it might mean a broken collarbone or sleeping on the couch. Neither of which Seb could survive right now.

_Boss will want to do this personally._

“Oh, yes. _Jim._ ” Sherringford smiles. “I _did_ enjoy having hi –“

_Well fuck,_ Sebastian thinks, _Jim can get mad at me later._

He puts a bullet in Sherringford’s kneecap.

The heavy bark of the Sig is echoed by the _pop-pop_ - _snap_ of Sherringford’s tendons; and then his high-pitched scream, rending the air. A plume of blood jets upwards, followed by chips of bone and stringy tendon. Mist and spray are lost between Sherringford’s fingers as he clamps them to the injury, but thicker chunks of muscle still ooze down his leg to the floor. The shot knocks him sideways; Sherringford stumbles, loses his balance, and falls. In the air he twists; an attempt to stop the mess of bone and stringy gore from touching ground first. His knife goes clattering away over the concrete. He hits hard, hip and shoulder, a clumsy _thud_ almost lost between his shrieks. Sebastian can see the tremors of impact go through what’s left of his knee. It’s mostly crater; a pulpy mass of red and pink and white, without any definition left.

_Hamburger. Guards must have been using hollow points._

Now the cells all smell the same. Blood. Sweat. Desperation.

John wrenches quickly back to Sherlock’s side. _Smart man._ Sherringford’s screams fade on the air as he runs out of breath to fuel them. Sebastian shoves the Sig down the back of his trousers; Sherringford’s not going anywhere, and the German pistol feels uncomfortable in his hands. He wants his own guns back: polished, in the gun cage at home, with Jim on the couch wrapped around a glass of mulled wine.

_Time we went home._

Sebastian turns to John and Sherlock. He meets John’s eyes first, because it’s easier. He can feel Sherlock’s stare like it’s about to drill through his scalp and pierce his brain.

“Not sure if I should thank you,” John tells him. Sebastian smiles.

“Not sure you should either.”

There’s a moment of silence. John starts again. “When we get out of here – “

“It’s back to cops-and-robbers. No, I get that.” Sebastian shakes his head, then – on a whim – extends his hand. “Hope I never see you again, Doc.”

John grins and takes it. “Can’t promise I won’t go looking.”

Sebastian barks out a laugh. “Day you catch Jim and I, I’ll buy you a pint.” Sherringford groans disgustedly behind them. John releases Sebastian’s hand, and gives him a tight military nod – _right, then._

No need to say anything else. It’s better that way. _Now for the hard one._

Sebastian turns to Sherlock. "I'm never going to forgive you."

"No, I should think not."

“What you did to me – “

“Alright, so it was morally grey –“

“Morally _wrong_ –“

“ _And_ , I’ll admit, ill-advised. Under the circumstances.” Sherlock glances at John. Sebastian grits his teeth. He’s not likely to get more of an apology than that.

"I'll give you a couple days head start before I hunt you down and start handing you some fucking payback, then,” he tells Sherlock, by way of acceptance.

Sherlock scoffs. “If you _can._ ”

_Jim would never let me._

“Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind."

\---------------

Sebastian watches John and Sherlock disappear down the hallway towards the exit. _There but for the Grace of God…_ he thinks. John’s shadow is relaxed. Sherlock’s shoulders tilt towards him, attentive. They orient themselves inwards, immune to the outside world. Sebastian sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose; half to stop it from bleeding again, and half to get up his courage.

The cell at the end of the hall. Sebastian’s not sure what he’ll find when he gets there. Half of him aches for the punishment he’s sure is coming, and half of him wants to wrap Jim up in a shock blanket. He wants to bind Jim’s fists in fabric and hold off the violence, if just for a bit. Just for long enough to stitch the two of them back together.

_Wishful thinking._

Sebastian leaves Sherringford on the ground; there’s nowhere for him to run, after all. They’re miles from anyone that will help Sherringford now.

\---------------

At the door of the room, Sebastian hesitates. Jim has his face turned to the wall, lying flat on his back. His hand lays limp on the bed, fingers half-curled upwards like claws. His chest shudders when he breathes, his lungs unsteady. Sebastian’s throat closes.

“You don’t have to come back in here,” Jim drones in monotone, “I’m not going to fall for that again. A little _pathetic,_ having to drug someone so they’ll _touch_ you.”

Jim doesn’t sound anything as mundane as _sad._ Just hollow. The lilt is stripped from his voice, leaving him dull and robotic. Sebastian twists his fingers around rage and culpability, making tight fists at his sides. He thinks about the stringy hamburger that had been Sherringford’s knee to calm himself.

_Patience._

Trying for humour, Sebastian tells the back of Jim’s head, “If it’ll cheer you up, I’ll deliver his head on a stick. But I thought you’d want to watch me do the beheading.”

Jim jerks like he’s been shot. He flips himself to his side and stares at Sebastian, taking him in; injuries, mud, _gun._

“Tiger,” Jim says, cautiously.

Sebastian gives Jim a forced smile, not trusting himself to move. “Think I’m a little bit late.”

The bravado makes Jim snort. “A _bit_.”

It’s all the bravery either of them can muster. Seb practically stumbles the rest of the way to Jim’s cot, sinking down in time to meet Jim rising halfway out of it. He wraps his arms around Jim from an awkward half-kneeling position, and Jim digs his fingers into Sebastian’s shoulders so hard Seb thinks he’s trying to pop them out of their sockets.

Jim is shaking. Sebastian holds him tighter, not sure if he’ll crush out breath or fear first.

"I thought it was you. I thought it was you." Jim trembles and repeats the words over and over, sharp with insanity and fear. He sounds like he’s apologizing. Seb presses his mouth against Jim’s hair, eyes squeezed shut like he can block out what Sherringford’s done to them.

“Shh. Fuck. Boss, I know.”

“I _thought it was you._ ”

\---------------

Sherringford has managed to drag himself out of the room into the hallway by the time Sebastian gets back to him. That’s as far as he goes. Sebastian picks him up by the scruff of the neck and tosses him bodily back into the cell. Above them, the light sways, casting deep and shifting shadows. In the dark Sherringford’s blood looks black instead of red.

Sebastian props Sherringford up in a chair, facing the door. A foot on the pulpy mess of his knee keeps him down, albeit still twisting and shrieking. His hands push futilely against Sebastian’s boot, too weak to shove him off. Hunks of meat and gore slip under Sebastian’s foot and spatter heavily against the ground. Seb finds it hard to give a fuck about that.

Jim saunters in casually; his crumpled suit-jacket and shoes retrieved and finally reassembled into an outfit. He looks at his ruined fingernails and sniffs, disappointed. Not looking so spotless, now. Sebastian watches him narrowly, waiting for a signal.

Jim glances upwards, and nods.

Sebastian grinds his toe downwards. Sherringford screams like he’s being ripped in two. The shriek is curiously impersonal; it doesn’t really sound particularly like Sherringford. It could be anyone under Seb’s boot, shrieking, any one of Jim’s clients or victims or prospective employees. That irrational, animal howl reduces Sherringford to nothing but another body in torment.

_That’s all that’s all you are now, Sherringford. You’re a victim. This is where you sit and scream. And this is where I hurt you._

_And then Jim decides if we kill you or not._

Sebastian secures Sherringford to a chair with zip-lock ties. Looting the guards’ corpses had been productive. Sherringford glares upwards, panting, and opens his mouth. He looks like he might be considering speaking.

Sebastian punches him twice sharply in the mouth to dissuade him.

Sherringford’s eyes go dazed, his head lolling back in the chair. A trickle of blood starts in the corner of his mouth, curves down over his chin. Sebastian turns back to Jim.

“Well, Boss?”

“No rush. We’ve got all night.” Jim gives Sebastian another quick jerk of the head. Sebastian double-checks the zip ties before he nods back. _Safe._ Jim saunters over, grabs Sherringford’s chin between his thumb and index finger. Sherringford’s throat works, but he doesn’t look like he’s capable of forming words, let alone sentences.

Jim finds the pressure point at the back of Sherringford’s jaw. He presses in – Sebastian sees the blood leave his fingers with the force of it – and Sherringford’s mouth pops open. Jim bends over him like a horse-trader, inspecting his teeth. Sherringford’s eyes water. Jim’s expression is cool and disinterested when he straightens and turns to Sebastian.

“ _Somebody’s_ not smart enough for cyanide,” he quips. Seb grins at him, and Jim smiles back with the sort of bleak, desperate humour that comes from being at the very end of your rope.

“You know,” Jim starts, “I hope you believe in karma. Because this is just too, too _perfect._ ” He bends down and plucks Sherringford’s discarded knife from the floor. The smile plastered on his face is one Seb recognizes; usually reserved for when he’s fucking. A languid, enticing smile full of indolent and dangerous promise. “Shall we get going, then?”

\---------------

They barely make it through the door of 221B before Sherlock slams John up against the wall and kisses him, open-mouthed and desperate. His body crushes the air out of John, holding him upright by nothing more than friction and will. John lets himself sag into the kiss, clutching at Sherlock’s filthy shirt over his ribs. Sherlock’s mouth claims him, shapes him. John feels disparate parts of himself he never knew were in conflict click into place.

He moans into Sherlock’s open mouth.

_This. This. This is what I wanted, all along, always –_

Somehow John manages to shove Sherlock’s shirt up over his head. He has to break the kiss to get it off but, _oh,_ it’s worth it. The smooth expanse of Sherlock’s skin seems almost to glow in the dim light of the stairwell. John runs his thumbs over the bones of Sherlock’s collar, the fragile places where structure meets surface. Sherlock’s skin is warm under his palms. When Sherlock draws breath to snarl, his chest heaves, pushing them closer together. John’s breath goes ragged, loud in the quiet of the hall.

Sherlock’s mouth, hot and fevered, traces the shell of John’s ear. His teeth follow, little nipping snags of pain like rocks in the current between them. John grunts, pressing his hips forward into Sherlock. The friction is unbearable. As soon as he moves John needs more, desire making his grip tighten. His thumbs dig in to the pressure points in the dip of Sherlock’s shoulders, and it must hurt; John isn’t a weak man. Sherlock doesn’t seem to care. Sherlock bites John’s neck and ruts against him, slamming him back into the wall over and over until John’s mind cries out against it.

“ _Please,_ ” he gasps, even though he’s not sure what he’s asking for.

“Yes,” Sherlock responds. There’s no indication he knows what they’re talking about either.

They fall upwards to the flat together. John sees the living room as a blur, unimportant scenery as Sherlock throws him in the direction of the bedroom. They go careening off the walls, shoving each other this-way-and-that in impatience and greed.

Somehow, madly, they collide with the table. Sherlock shoves John face-first down onto it, fitting his weight over John from behind. John tries to brace himself, knocking a beaker down to shatter over the floor. The sharp smell of chemicals fills the air, wrapping up around them, burning John’s eyes. Then Sherlock gets the buckle of John’s trousers, and shoves his pants down around his knees, and John’s fingernails leave long, pale gouges in the hard wood underneath him.

Sherlock’s hand on his cock is unbelievably hot and tight. John cries out, flattened underneath Sherlock. His hips rock back, bare ass pressing against the roughness of Sherlock’s trousers, and Sherlock’s fingers slide smoothly over his shaft. John feels pre-cum bead and slick down over his cock with each stroke of Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock is breathing heavily, air whistling softly through his parted lips.

“ _Please,_ ” John says again, begging, mindless.

“ _Yes,_ ” Sherlock hisses back, just as reduced to meaningless sound.

One final stroke of John’s cock and Sherlock hauls him up, twisting him around for another devouring kiss. There’s an awkward moment where John loses his balance and they almost go over together – but Sherlock catches them, stumbling into the table and sending more dishes smashing down to the tile floor.

Sherlock bites at John’s lips, leaving them swollen and aching. John has to toe off his shoes to step out of his trousers, and it’s nearly impossible but entirely worth it. He’ll die if he breaks contact between them, if he rips his lips away for something as mundane as _undressing._ Sherlock has a hand on either side of his jaw, anyways, holding him steady and unrelenting into their kiss. John feels the narrow focus of Sherlock’s brilliant mind, all on him, attention and desire buzzing so thick on the air between them John half believes there’s no oxygen left. Sherlock kisses John like if he only tries hard enough, he can make it _perfect._

Sherlock might not be wrong about that.

John kicks his trousers and pants off, skittering over the broken glass on the floor. He manages to wrestle off Sherlock’s belt and then they’re moving again; Sherlock pulls John off the table, walks him backwards until they hit the bookshelf to the left of the hallway door. John’s shoulders crack into it so hard his spine arcs, making the shelf sway and one of Sherlock’s chemistry texts fall off the top shelf. Pain wakes John up; drags him out of his lust-induced stupor.

Another falling book deals a glancing blow to Sherlock’s shoulder – “ _Ow!_ ” – and John starts giggling. He can’t help himself. He presses his face into Sherlock’s bare chest, smothering his laughter in the familiar smell of chemicals and sweat and tea. Sherlock’s laugh is a physical thing, a rumble against John’s cheek. He pins John to the shelf with an arm on either side of him, like a cage, huffing out breathless laughter.

His skin is enticingly warm and close to John’s mouth. John tilts his head in deeper, licks a stripe over Sherlock’s chest. Just above the nipple. “John,” Sherlock says carefully, laughter catching in his throat.

John takes that as encouragement.

He sucks Sherlock’s nipple in, letting his teeth rake it just hard enough to make Sherlock gasp and sag into him. The bookshelf sways, but there’s no second assault from the top shelf. John giggles again, even though it’s inappropriate, and bites at Sherlock harder.

Sherlock moans. _“John._ ” A little more insistent, now. Impatient.

John gets the button of Sherlock’s trousers and shoves them over his bony hips, letting them pool down to the floor. Sherlock makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. His pants are white, stained damp in front, his cock jutting out obscenely from his body.

John fists around the tip of Sherlock’s cock and slides his hand down to the base. The soft fabric of Sherlock’s pants bunches under his touch, and Sherlock’s breathing frays. His head drops to John’s shoulder, damp curls pressed into John’s neck. John tilts his head back and Sherlock clutches his shoulders, cursing, holding them together.

“Bed?” Even though John knows it’s going to make getting there more difficult, he doesn’t stop stroking Sherlock over his pants. Each slide of his fist makes Sherlock jerk forward, crushing John back against the bookshelf.

“Yes, oh _god_ , John – ”

They tumble down the hallway, a mess of mouths and skin and clutching hands. John hops on one foot to pull his socks off and one slides into the bathroom; gone forever, in the way of unpartnered hosiery. Sherlock strips his pants and leaves them in the doorway for John to trip over, both of them breathless, laughing, clinging to each other and rutting together with greedy abandon.

Sherlock presses John face-first down into the sheets, which are crisp and cool and smell thickly of Sherlock. John hangs half off the edge of the bed, ass in the air – precariously braced on the very tips of his toes. Canting his hips up pushes his face and chest into the bed, but John can’t stop anyways; rocking his hips mindlessly against Sherlock’s scratchy duvet. It’s not terribly comfortable, but Sherlock’s hands press him roughly into position and John really doesn’t _want_ to say no.

“Just like that, John,” Sherlock breathes. His fingers trace the curve of John’s spine, down over his arse. “God, I have _wanted_ this.”

Sherlock’s fingers withdraw and John hears a drawer pulled open. There’s a neat plastic-sounding snap as Sherlock opens a bottle of lube. John twists to look at him – not moving from the awkward position Sherlock’s got him in, but trying to get a glimpse of Sherlock as best he can.

It’s worth wrenching his back for.

Sherlock hesitates at the bed side, two fingers and his thumb slick and shiny with lube. His face and chest are flushed, small scars and freckles standing out clear against his ruddy skin. His eyes are dark, but his expression is carefully controlled; as if he’s fighting himself for each even breath he sucks in through his parted, swollen lips. His curls twine around his cheeks and neck like a halo, or horns.

He’s watching John, focused, considering. “Alright?”

As if John could turn back now. “I want you to fuck me,” he tells Sherlock, “ _Please._ ” After so long, admitting it feels like a weight lifted from John’s shoulders. He barely hears Sherlock’s reply.

It’s lost in the slick press of fingers against his entrance. The first finger that breaches him is – a strange feeling, yes, but in squirming away John rocks himself forward against the bed. The sinful pull of the sheets on the skin of his cock makes him moan, relaxing, pressing back onto Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock hisses out a curse, and his finger stabs upwards again – rocking John forward, against the sheets, drawing more deep, pleading sounds from his throat.

_Feedback loop._

The more Sherlock’s fingers fuck him open, the more he rocks against the sheets, the more he presses back onto Sherlock’s fingers. John relaxes enough for a second finger to push in, and there is a delicious burn – a _fullness_ – that punches the air from his lungs entirely. He flattens against the bed, letting the motion of Sherlock’s wrist rock him forward, panting for breath.

It’s almost overwhelming. Almost.

Then, out of nowhere, someone touches a live electric wire to his spine. John cries out – hands scrabbling above his head to clutch the sheets, because oh _Jesus,_ oh _Christ,_ **_that_** _._ A series of choked out noises emerge from John’s mouth that he really has nothing to do with, and Sherlock –

Sherlock grabs John’s hips with one hand, pulls him upwards, and does it again. John feels the world go narrow and dim. Light sparks on his nerve-endings. A great breathless pressure settles in his stomach.

“ _Sherlock – “_

“Yes.”

The withdrawal of Sherlock’s fingers leaves John empty and cold. He keens, pressing backwards, dimly aware of the embarrassment of the whole thing – after all, he’s still waving his ass off Sherlock’s bed. But before it can get to him, Sherlock folds himself down over John’s back, and thinking becomes difficult again. His warm weight presses John completely flat against the bed; everything except for his hips, which Sherlock hauls upwards.

John feels the blunt heat of Sherlock’s cock press against his entrance. He sucks in two heaving lungfuls of air, feels the hot pant of Sherlock’s breath at his ear. Sherlock’s teeth scrape his earlobe, and slowly – _torturously_ – Sherlock starts to work inside him. Just an inch, at first, then withdrawing – another inch, withdrawing – deeper with each successive thrust. Sherlock’s length inside him is painful, burning. It _shouldn’t_ be a pleasant sensation; but god, it _is._ John is breathless and desperately hard, pushing his hips back for more. Sherlock’s cock brushes John’s prostate on the last thrust before he’s fully seated, and John jerks; twitching back against Sherlock’s chest.

“That’s it,” Sherlock purrs, a rumble between them, softer and harder to feel than his laugh. “That’s my John. _Mine._ ”

The first full thrust is slow. John aches with it; the protracted drag of Sherlock’s cock over his prostate leaves him feeling raw, like every nerve in his body has been laid open and vulnerable. Sherlock takes his time, slow, purposeful rolls of his hips that drive John mad _._ He nearly cries with it, writhing underneath Sherlock. If this is what it’s like to be fucked, _god,_ he needs _more._

“Please, Sherlock - !”

At John’s plea Sherlock’s hips snap wickedly forward. His cock drives into John so deep and fast that John loses the ability to think, mind lost beneath a white thunderbolt through his hips to his brain. There’s a wicked _smack_ of flesh on flesh that echoes through the room, punctuating Sherlock’s growl. Another thrust follows, the same sharp _snap_ that plunges Sherlock deep into John. John cries out something, wordless, meaning _Sherlock_ but unable to form even that.

Sherlock pounds into John over and over, the vicious slap of his hips against John’s ass pushing them forward onto the bed, making it creak and whine. John is _beyond_ wanting. His legs feel disconnected from his body, tingling like they’re asleep; each stab of Sherlock’s cock against his prostate driving John’s conscious mind further from his body. John’s toes scramble on the floorboard, trying to hold his impossible balance. Each time Sherlock slams into him John hears himself grunt and whine and pant out half-formed pleas, forced over his lips by the growing heat in his stomach.

_I can’t,_ John thinks wildly, _Oh, Christ, I can’t._

He shoves a hand beneath himself, wraps a fist around his cock. Above him, Sherlock hisses – thrusting harder, his body going rigid. John grips tight, thumb running along his slit as he’s fucked downwards into his own hand. His whole body feels hot, like he’s been lit up on the inside by neon light. It’s hard to get much speed on his cock because of the way Sherlock’s pinning him down, but it doesn’t matter. How could it matter? John can feel the pulse of Sherlock’s cock, the thick throb of heartbeat and orgasm as Sherlock cries out his name.

John’s so close he might cry.

Sherlock pulls off, flips him bodily over with one hand on his shoulder. John wouldn’t have guessed Sherlock for the manhandling type but he doesn’t _care,_ it doesn’t _matter,_ what _matters_ is the dark look in Sherlock’s eyes as he reaches both hands out for John.

One wraps around John’s own hand, palm warm and damp against John’s knuckles, directing the stroke of his fist. The other pushes inside him. Three fingers stroke over John’s prostate, and Sherlock’s grip tightens – squeezing John’s cock hard with his own fist. John calls out, open-mouthed, broken. Sherlock leans over him. His tongue licks John’s moan out of his mouth. The heat in John’s stomach bursts; it’s a dam breaking, a fire hitting gunpowder.

Into Sherlock’s mouth, John cries _mercy,_ and his come coats their hands together.

\---------------

“Let me get this _right,”_ Jim purrs, in that calm and dangerous tone that means somebody’s getting disassembled. “You killed Mycroft’s secretary to get his attention, knowing he’d send in his baby brother and _I’d_ follow Sherly.” He clucks his tongue. “Next time, you could try calling me yourself. I’m sure you have my number.”

Sherringford stirs again. “We would have – been good – together – ”

Sebastian almost pities him. Jim rounds on him like a dog with its tail bit, snarling, canines bared. Sebastian can just see the start of the madness that contorts Jim’s face; then Jim spins neatly into a back kick, and the edge of his foot slams into Sherringford’s knee.

His form is flawless. Seb remembers teaching him that.

“Interrupting is _rude_ ,” Jim sings. He pushes a hand through his hair to tidy it, ignoring Sherringford’s howls. “Now. Since you _missed_ a recap or two, let me remind you. No-one ever gets to me, Sherringford – and no-one ever will.” He leans over Sherringford in the chair. Sherringford has his teeth sunk in his lip to muffle his screams. Jim acts like they’re having a friendly, fire-side chat, but his eyes are bright and far too wide. “You didn’t even come close. You may have had a bit of _fun_ with us, but – _Daddy’s had enough now!”_

Sherringford jerks against the ties. Jim grins. He looks inhuman, looks like one of the Erinyes or Váli; transformed into a slavering wolf to tear out the throats of the wicked. It makes Sherringford’s eyes go wide and watery in fear. Usually this is the point where Seb might pity Jim’s victims; but there isn’t an inch of Sherringford’s skin that _deserves_ pity.

“You know what I can do. Who I am. Didn’t it seem a teensy bit stupid to _piss me off?_!” Jim’s got the wolf in the way he screams. Sherringford squirms away from him, fighting the ties, panting through a grimace as he tries to fight panic. Sebastian knows what that’s like, and there’s a feral sort of triumph to watching terror spread over Sherringford Holmes. Seb’s hand tightens on his borrowed gun, fighting to keep himself patient. The knee wasn’t nearly enough.

Finally, Jim turns from Sherringford and fixes Sebastian with an imperious stare. “Skin him for me, _would_ you, Tiger? No – Wait.” Without a pause, immediately changing his mind, he holds up a finger and glances from Sherringford to Sebastian and back again. “I’ve _got_ it,” he decides abruptly. His smile turns dark in the way only Jim’s can, a death’s-head grin with no real humour left in it. “I want a _Holmes-skin-rug_. You seemed like you had so much fun with that _play-by-play,_ Sherry. _Tiger._ ” He snaps his fingers. “Come here. I’m going to _whisper_ you through _filleting_ him.”

Sherringford can’t seem to decide which of them to stare at in horror as Sebastian steps forward. The skin on his lip, caught between his teeth, goes white with pressure and then flushed red as the capillaries break over his tightening jaw. It’s a good look on him. Sebastian feels his face fall into righteous, merciless lines. He doesn’t have it in him to grin like Jim does, but _fuck_ ; he’s going to enjoy this.

Jim runs his fingers up Sebastian’s arm and into his hair, where they catch painfully on matted blood and muck. Sebastian turns his face into the touch anyways; Jim’s thumb strokes over his bruises, over his split lip, over his ruined nose. His fingers are cool on Sebastian’s skin, like a balm against his wounds. Sherringford makes a noise of disgust. Jim’s eyes flick to him. His fingers, trailing down Sebastian’s neck, pause on Seb’s collar bone. They drum there as he thinks.

Finally he leans in and stage-whispers conspiratorially to Sebastian’s ear, “Alright, Tiger. Here’s where you start cutting...”

\---------------

Afterwards they make it as far as the car. No further.

Sebastian is covered in blood and bone-tired. If it were up to him, they’d just shove everything aside; ignore it all until they’re home safe. Or possibly forever. But it’s _not_ up to Seb, and Jim can’t just leave things be. Sebastian has only gotten as far as fumbling with the electric key fob when Jim’s weight presses into him from behind. Two bony arms wrap tight around Sebastian’s stomach, fingers splayed over his gore-soaked shirt.

Jim’s voice is calm and level, but his grip is hard enough to press the breath out of Seb. “I’m going to need you to touch me now,” he says.

Sebastian, obediently, turns in Jim’s arms. It’s not easy. Jim doesn’t seem to want to loosen his grip enough to allow for the movement; in the end, Sebastian manages but his shirt doesn’t; twisting around like an Indian burn over the sensitive skin of his ribs. It’s still raining, lightly; Jim’s hair is plastered to his skin, streaks of water washing dirt down over his neck into the collar of his suit.

_This one’s a write-off,_ Seb thinks. It’s only the second suit he’s even seen Jim ruin.

He holds Jim carefully, unsure where the injuries are; knowing there has to be some under Jim’s invulnerable act. He wants to take Jim home, strip him bare, and find every place on him that Sherringford had the _gall_ to touch. Wipe it all clean again.

Jim presses his face into Sebastian’s chest, and muffled, says; “I know you were with Sherlock. I _know._ That was awful of you, and I _do_ have to punish you. Eventually.”

Sebastian knows Jim better than to think that’s the end of it. “Yes, Boss.”

“Not now, though,” Jim concludes, quietly. “Later. Maybe. Maybe not. I…”

Sebastian’s heart lurches. Second suit he’s seen Jim ruin. But Jim _never_ hesitates with a sentence like that. Seb reaches out, runs his fingers over Jim’s hair; but Jim jerks away.Seb has _no idea_ what to say.

“I’m so _changeable_ , after all.” Jim’s voice breaks on the words. Sebastian isn’t really sure what that’s supposed to mean, what Jim’s trying to communicate. It doesn’t matter. Jim sighs. “Get in the back seat, Sebastian.”

Seb fumbles with the keys over Jim’s head; gets the door unlocked, and somehow shoves them in to the backseat together. Jim immediately squirms underneath Seb; lying flat on his back on the leather, he kicks off his shoes and suit jacket. Sebastian takes this as a cue.

_Thank **god** for automatic heating systems,_ he thinks, _and thank Jim not sparing expense a day in his life._

He peels off Jim’s filthy shirt, his crumpled tie. Jim shivers, even with the electric heat of the car going full blast. There’re bruises sucked down his chest like the spots of a faun, darkening imprints of Sherringford’s teeth. Sebastian feels the cold ache of hatred in his stomach. He wants Sherringford alive again, just to suffer one moment more.

Jim makes a soft sound, wrapping his fingers painfully in Sebastian’s hair and tugging him closer. Sebastian shoves thoughts of Sherringford aside and obediently folds himself over Jim, pressing him down into the heated leather seats. He fixes his mouth to Jim’s neck, over the bruises. Cold fingers shove up under the back of Sebastian’s bloodstained shirt and he fumbles to get it all the way off; god knows Jim isn’t going to undress him.

Jim’s murmuring something to himself, lips moving on almost soundless syllables as he runs his fingers over Sebastian’s injuries. Sebastian pins Jim against the seats, their bare chests flush, Jim’s skin fever-hot against his own. Jim trembles, head to toe, sending droplets from his soaking hair down to run along the seats.

“He _touched_ you,” Jim mutters, finally loud enough for Sebastian to hear.

“I’m sorry,” Seb tells him, because it’s true, because he wants Jim to believe it.

“No one _touches_ you, Tiger. No one touches _either_ of us.” Jim tilts his head back to see Sebastian’s face, his grip tightening painfully over Seb’s bruised and broken ribs. Sebastian grunts in pain, and Jim seems to take this as agreement. He leans up and sinks his teeth hard into the thin flesh over Sebastian’s jaw, ignoring the blood already drying on Seb’s face.

The shock of it is bright and intense, and Sebastian has to fight the urge to jerk backwards. It’s only when Jim bites again – higher up, on Sebastian’s already bruised cheek-bone – that Seb realizes what he’s doing.

_Granted, hickeys on the face are a bit **insane** as far as possessiveness goes –_

“You’re _mine,_ ” Jim hisses. He snaps viciously at Sebastian’s ear, sharp teeth drawing a watery trickle of blood. “ _Mine.”_ His hands claw at Sebastian’s trousers – shoving them down just so he can grab more greedy handfuls of Sebastian’s skin.

Maybe he doesn’t want to _fuck_ Sebastian as much as _consume_ him, but Seb can’t help the way his cock twitches and starts to swell. Not with Jim writhing and clawing underneath him, clutching at his broken ribs. Jim never stops biting, either; like he wants to reclaim Seb’s skin, bruise by bruise. Or maybe he’s trying to eat Sebastian whole. Sebastian drowns in Jim – in the sharp agony of Jim’s teeth, the stabbing ache of Jim’s grip on his bones.

“Sherlock didn’t _know_ you,” Jim insists, hissing hot into Sebastian’s ear. “I’m the _only_ one who _knows_ you. There’s only _us_ , do you understand me?”

Maybe what Jim can’t say is that Sherringford didn’t know _him_ , either.

_There’s only **us**._

“Yes – “ Sebastian gasps. Jim snarls. He hauls Sebastian’s hips downwards – bare skin rutting against the rough cloth of Jim’s trousers. Seb can’t tell if Jim’s aroused or not, and after what Sherringford did, oh, _fuck,_ getting a hard on now is more than a fucking _bit_ not good –

Or it would be; only this is Jim Moriarty. Changeable Jim. He laughs, breathless, against Sebastian’s ear. “That’s right, Tiger. Be Daddy’s good boy. I _own_ you. Don’t you forget.” His hand snakes between them, wraps around Sebastian’s half-hard cock. Sebastian groans – not pain, this time, but satisfaction as he fucks himself forward into the tight ring of Jim’s fingers. Jim’s hand is cold, but soft and just a little slick already from blood and rain. Sebastian feels himself get harder, the skin on his cock growing taut and snagging on Jim’s palm.

“Nobody else can touch us,” Jim tells Seb again, which is redundant but _who fucking cares_ at a time like this.

Sebastian pants out some sort of vague agreement. He shifts his weight to one forearm above Jim’s head and reaches down between them. His knuckles brush against Jim’s as Jim strokes his cock, and Sebastian tries desperately to hold on to enough brain-power to get Jim’s trousers undone. He takes too long at it, losing his mind. Jim bites the hollow of his shoulder in growling frustration.

“Fuck – Give me a fucking second – “

“ _No._ ”

Sebastian finally manages Jim’s trouser button and zip, which is a fucking _miracle_ considering the grip Jim’s got on him. He finds Jim hard already, pre-cum slick on Sebastian’s palm as Jim slides into his hand. Sebastian can hear Jim’s breath catch; his grip tightens on Seb’s cock, an instinctive reaction that makes Seb’s hips buck violently forward.

Jim tosses his head back, eyes screwed shut, damp hair flicking out against the seat. He rolls upwards into Sebastian’s hand; slow, deliberate thrusts. His neck is bared in a long, clean line, the cartilage rungs of his trachea clearly visible.

Sebastian can’t help himself.

He sets his teeth to Jim’s throat as he strokes; not hard enough to cut off oxygen, just clamped around Jim’s trachea so he can feel the life and the breath of each shuddering gasp Jim takes.

_As long as Jim’s breathing –_

Jim’s spare hand wraps around Seb’s throat in response and it’s probably no coincidence that his fingers end up on Seb’s pulse point. Sebastian is acutely aware of his heartbeat; pounding in his ears, in his stomach, against Jim’s fingertips. The car smells hotly of sweat and pre-cum, now, and the muddy wet of rainwater in Jim’s hair. Sebastian grinds downwards, ignoring the scream of his abused body to stop. Human limits be damned.

The press of their hips together crushes Seb’s fist tight on Jim’s cock, and Jim’s throat works against Sebastian’s teeth as he pants for air. His body is flawlessly still except for the shudder of his hips up into Sebastian’s fist, grip going loose as he forgets about Seb’s pleasure to chase his own. Sebastian snarls, feeling his breath thrum on Jim’s throat, and the answering vibration of Jim’s groan.

Blood slicks his hand on Jim’s cock and the smell of it is thick on the air as it heats, iron and salt like the sea. Jim whimpers; a hitching sound in the back of his throat. He surges upwards, letting go of Sebastian’s throat and cock in order to wrap himself hard around Sebastian’s shoulders. Sebastian ducks his head down to Jim’s chest and presses his lips over Jim’s heart, where his pulse is racing and frantic.

“Come on, Boss,” he murmurs, wondering if Jim can read his lips through sensation alone.

Jim buries his teeth into Sebastian’s shoulder, so deep Sebastian thinks he’s going to rip out the muscle completely. He goes rigid, draw tight by the force of his release, and Seb can feel his come spurt hot between them; mixing with the blood and the sweat and the rain. Jim is utterly silent, except for the ragged heave of his breath. It’s Sebastian that groans; not because he’s frustrated, although _fuck_ , he is, cock grinding against Jim’s thigh with nowhere near enough sensation to get him off – but it’s the _relief_ of it.

This is how it _should_ be between them. Sloppy and more than a little painful, more than a little insane. This is _right._

Jim pushes at his chest and Sebastian rolls off, so they’re facing each other on the cramped back seat of the car. The windows are steamed, and the air is getting stale; Sebastian has to gulp deep breaths of it just to keep his head from going light. Jim stares up at him with wide, devouring eyes, trying to drink in every twitch of Sebastian’s expression. His fingers wrap back around Sebastian’s cock and he starts stroking again; not teasing, this time, not _patient._ He rolls his wrist and slides his thumb over Seb’s slit, tight and quick. His hair, drying in a million directions at once, frames his cheeks in a gauzy cloud.

“Eyes on me, Seb,” he commands, “Don’t you _dare_ look away.”

And Seb doesn’t, not even when Jim grips tight and Seb loses himself into the mess of sex and blood between them.

\---------------

Jim takes Sebastian home.

Usually, it’s the other way around. Usually Sebastian takes Jim home, nurses the cuts Jim doesn’t even remember getting. Now it’s Jim who curses under his breath as he wraps white bandages around Sebastian’s injuries. He’s making an awful bloody mess of the job. Jim doesn’t have half an idea what he’s doing; in all the massive labyrinthine mess of Jim’s brain, there’s no corner devoted to taking care of anyone. He tries, anyways.

Sebastian lets him. _I’m not going to die of shoddy wrappings. And this –_ This is worth it, the way Jim chews his tongue when he concentrates and tugs the knots too tight to make sure they’ll never, ever slip.

He pauses with his hands on the bandage, over the spreading saturation of blood. His fingers twitch down into Sebastian’s injuries. Sebastian lets him think, even though it hurts like the bloody fucking Dickens. Jim glances up, and scowls – reading something in Sebastian’s expression that he can’t like, can’t even address.

He reaches forward, clutches Sebastian’s skull in two bony hands. A bead of sweat runs through Sebastian’s hair between the tips of Jim’s fingers, behind his head. Jim jerks his chin upwards, and Sebastian meets his eyes.

“Listen _good,_ Tiger,” Jim’s voice is easy, unhurried. It’s a stark contrast to the death grip he’s got on Sebastian. His eyes are shadowed. His fingers dig tight into Sebastian’s skull. “Wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. You’re not to be _taken away_ again _,_ can you understand that? You’re never _ever_ to be separated from me.” His black eyes flick back and forth between Sebastian’s, searching for something with breathless apprehension.

“Never,” Sebastian agrees.

Jim’s eyes sink shut. It looks like release. He sighs, lets go, and keels forward into Sebastian’s embrace.

_Never,_ Sebastian promises himself, holding Jim, _never again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now as Separation is (weird to say it!) finally over, I'd really love to hear what you thought! So, post a comment - or, if you want to do a review, that would make my heart stop. 
> 
> My favorite thing about writing this has been seeing peoples reactions to it and the more of those I get to see the more rewarding it is. So - if you've enjoyed it - please. Tell me what you thought. Thank you so much for reading!   
>  <3


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